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Psychoanalysis and Cosmic Order
Robert Campbell (June 2017)
Abstract
The article is in two parts. Part One reviews the structural foundations of psychoanalysis in broad outline as initiated by Sigmund Freud and further developed by Carl Jung. The focus is on structure as it relates to both normal behaviour as well as abnormal stressful conditions. In Part Two, it is shown how this structural outline is consistent in some essential details and inconsistent in others with how the cosmic order was revealed to the author. Psychoanalysis is a branch of psychiatry pioneered by Sigmund Freud. It was clear to him that many mainstream psychiatric problems are rooted in the formative years from infancy, together with later staged developments and compensations according to individual circumstances. His sexual theory was especially central to his practice. The stages of development that he defined will be largely skipped over without commenting on their validity in order to focus on his overall structural synthesis. Later, the relevance of both Freud's work and that of Jung to the cosmic order will be reviewed.
Part One
Notes on Freud's Personal History
Freud was born to Jewish parents in 1856, in the Moravian town of Freiberg, now in the Czech Republic, the first of eight children. His father Jakob's family were Hasidic Jews, and although Jakob himself had left the tradition, he was known for his Torah study. He married Amalia Nathansohn, who was 20 years younger and his third wife. They were struggling financially and living in a rented room in a locksmith's house when Sigmund was born.
Freud was an outstanding pupil and graduated from the Matura in 1873 with honors. He loved literature and was proficient in German, French, Italian, Spanish, English, Hebrew, Latin and Greek. He entered the University of Vienna at age 17 and graduated with an MD in 1881. He had a special interest in Darwinism. Freud began smoking at 24, becoming strongly addicted to a couple dozen cigars a day.
In 1882, Freud began his medical career at the Vienna General Hospital. His research work in cerebral anatomy led to the publication of a seminal paper on the palliative effects of cocaine in 1884 and his work on aphasia would form the basis of his first book. Over a three-year period, Freud worked in various departments of the hospital. His time spent in Meynert's psychiatric clinic and as a locum in a local asylum led to an interest in clinical work.
Sigmund and Martha met in April 1882 and after a four-year engagement they were married in Hamburg. Freud and Bernays's love letters sent during the engagement years, according to Freud's official biographer Ernest Jones, "would be a not unworthy contribution to the great love literature of the world." Freud sent over 900 (lengthy) letters to his fiancée, which chart the ups and downs of a tempestuous relationship, marred by outbreaks of jealousy on his part. The fire faded after the marriage when Freud poured himself whole heartedly into his work.
The young Martha Bernays was a slim and attractive woman who was a charmer, intelligent, well-educated and fond of reading. As a married woman, she ran her household efficiently, and was almost obsessive about punctuality and dirt. Firm but loving with her six children, she spread an atmosphere of peaceful joie de vivre through the household (at least according to the French analyst René Laforgue). However, Martha was not able to establish a strong connection with her youngest daughter, Anna, who was closer to her father and his work. From 1891 until they left Vienna in 1938, Freud and his family lived in an apartment in a historical district of Vienna. In 1896, Minna Bernays, Martha Freud's sister, became a permanent member of the Freud household after the death of her fiancé. The close relationship she formed with Freud led to rumors of an affair.
Freud's Basic Structural Outline
Freud defined the id, ego, and super-ego as three theoretical parts of the psyche in terms of whose activity and interaction our mental life is described. The id consists of unconscious instinctual drives and appetites that often exist in mutual contradiction. These are largely inherited from birth and it should be added that they may include innate talents and behavioral tendencies. The super-ego plays the role of conscience and morality that places limits on the id. The ego is the learned organized part that must mediate the other two according to circumstance.
The basic structure was introduced along with the Oedipus concept in 1899, when Freud was 43. The id, ego and super-ego are purely psychological concepts that were not intended to correspond to structures of the brain or nervous system. There is nevertheless a general correspondence to our three brains, namely the emotional limbic brain, the language bound left hemisphere, and the intuitive and holistic right hemisphere respectively.
The ego finds itself engaged in conflict with repressed impulses in the id and subordinated to the super-ego. And at the same time, the interplay between the love instinct (Eros) and the death instinct (Thanatos) can manifest itself in all three.
The ego controls the id, like the rider of a horse, but sometimes the rider is obliged to guide the horse where it wants to go. Since the ego relates to sensory experience of the phenomenal world, Freud regarded the ego as a mental projection of the surface of one's physical body and thus concems personal behavior in concert with the phenomenal behavior of the universe, whether it is other people, animals, plants, the weather, or whatever.
A close relationship between Freud and Fliess came to a bitter end. Freud claimed that a combination of a homoerotic attachment and the residue of his "specifically Jewish mysticism" lay behind loyalty to his Jewish friend and he over-estimated the work of Fliess. Despite his rejection of religion, Freud retained his social allegiance to Judaism. Freud and family escaped from Austria in 1938 with the help of friends. Suffering from severe terminal cancer of the jaw he died in 1939 at London from lethal injections of morphine at his request.
Eros and Thanatos
Eros and Thanatos operate within the structure of id, ego and super-ego. In his 1920 book "Beyond the Pleasure Principle," Freud applied the concept of Eros to psychoanalysis. He referred to Eros as the life instinct, which includes sexual instincts, the drive to live, and basic instinctual impulses such as thirst and hunger. These are primal appetites that one strives to gratify. We seek the erotic experience of unity or fulfillment. Its counterpart is Thanatos, which is the death instinct, although Freud did not use this word explicitly. He came to understand it as being directed outwards for control over others. It becomes what he called "the destructive instinct, the instinct for mastery, or the will to power."
To communicate his sexual theory, Freud used the Oedipus story from Greek mythology. Unknowingly Oedipus killed his father in combat and married his mother, fathering two siblings. Freud used the story to exemplify a son's erotic attachment to his mother from infancy. He later acknowledged an opposite Oedipus complex for a daughter's erotic attachment to her father. Jung named the latter the Electra complex after a Greek matricidal myth. Freud considered the term Electra complex inaccurate. A friction between them had developed. Freud resented challenge to his fatherly authority to the point of fainting.
Freud's development of the theory involved self-analysis. His beautiful, and dynamic mother Amalia called him "my golden Sigi," and favored him over his seven siblings, a relationship he treasured. His ineffectual father Jacob was twice her age of 20, being 40 when Sigmund was born. His father's business failed when Sigmund was four and they lived in poverty.
His genial father's death in 1896 traumatized Freud. He experienced extreme mood fluctuations, feelings of impotence, failure, guilt, a "neurasthenia" which prompted a "self-analysis" of his dreams and childhood memories. His explorations of his feelings of hostility to his father and rivalrous jealousy over his mother's affections led him to a revised theory of neuroses. This led to the publication of The Interpretation of Dreams, in which he outlined the structural basis of his theory. He regarded it his most important work.
A more classic example of the Oedipus complex is given in Adolf Hitler's relationship to his parents. Adolf rejected his physically abusive father who was 23 years older than his loving and consoling mother. Four years after his father's death, Adolf was crushed by his mother's death when he was 18 and he carried the grief the rest of his life. As the Nazi leader, Hitler sought erotic self-confirmation as the Fuehrer and the sole source of power in Germany.
In general, Eros is directed inward while Thanatos is directed outward. This summarizes how an imbalance between inward and outward perceptions influence the mind set and behavior of individuals as well as cultures. It is essentially the source of all the world's problems. To simplify, most people have two sets of rules: one set for themselves and another set for others. A genuine creative balance between inside and outside is lacking Freud regarded the death drive as tending toward a level of zero tension with the idea that it tends toward a minimum level of tension. Freud reached the conclusion that the compulsion to repeat is an effort to restore a state that is both historically primitive and marked by the total draining of energy: death.
The Id
The id consists of emotional impulses and tendencies that either seek immediate fulfillment or settle for a compromise. The id supplies the energy for the development and continued functioning of conscious mental life, although the working processes of the id itself are completely unconscious in the adult (less unconscious in the child). In waking life, it belies its content in slips of the tongue, wit, art, and other modes of expression that are not rational at least in part. The primary methods for unmasking its content, according to Freud, are the analysis of dreams and free association.
Freud saw the id as the vehicle of the libido, or emotional tendencies, and drives that the ego employs and can modify through mechanisms of repression. Consequently, the id seeks alternative expression for impulses regarded as evil or excessively sexual that were felt as normal at an earlier stage and later repressed. The repressed memories tend to be screened or masked by displacing them to a different remembered event. Whereas the ego is associated with reason and sanity, the id belongs to the passions or emotional drives. It should be added that this need not be negative. Emotional energy also fuels our positive creative contributions.
"The division of mental life into what is conscious and what is unconscious is the fundamental premise on which psycho-analysis is based", He further distinguishes between two types of unconscious thoughts: "preconscious" ideas, which are latent yet fully capable of becoming conscious; and "unconscious" ideas, which are repressed and cannot become conscious without the help of psychoanalysis.
Before defining the ego explicitly, Freud argues for a manner in which unconscious thoughts can be made conscious. He believes the answer lies in the difference between unconscious thoughts and preconscious thoughts: The unconscious are "worked out upon some sort of material that remains unrecognized", while the preconscious are connected to perceptions, especially "verbal images". The difference, then, is a connection to words (more specifically, to the "memory residue" of words). The goal of psychoanalysis, then, is to connect the freely floating unconscious material to words via psychoanalytic dialogue. Freud believed that sexual instincts that stem from the id and bring about the Oedipus complex, are what dictate the shape and structure of the super-ego.
Freud also postulates a process of desexualization, when libidinal energy passes from the id (its origin) into the ego - which (through a process called "sublimation") abandons the original sexual aims and utilizes the energy to fuel thought and self-interested actions. The libido is, therefore, transformed into energy that can be applied toward creative or destructive aims. This indicates that the love instinct, Eros, is the primary motivation of the id. But Freud notes that the id's compulsion to comply with the love-instinct is also a manifestation of the pleasure principle, or the tendency to avoid tensions that come with the love-instinct.
The Ego
The goal of Freudian therapy, or psychoanalysis, was to bring repressed thoughts and feelings into ego consciousness in order to free the patient from suffering repetitive distorted emotions. This talking cure encouraged a patient to talk about dreams and engage in free association, in which patients report their thoughts without reservation and make no attempt to concentrate while doing so. Transference, the process by which patients displace onto their analysts feelings and ideas which derive from previous figures in their lives, was first seen as interfering with the recovery of repressed memories and disturbed patients' objectivity, but by 1912, Freud had come to see it as an essential part of the therapeutic process.
The ego concerns beliefs that influence behavior, among them religion. Freud regarded God as an infantile need for a powerful, supernatural father. Although religion restrained man's violent nature in the early stages of civilization, in modern times, he believed it can be set aside in favor of reason and science. He notes a likeness between religious belief and neurotic obsession. He thought that it serves as a buffer from man's "fear of nature" just as the belief in an afterlife serves as a buffer from man's fear of death. The core idea is that all religious belief can be explained by its function to society, not by its relation to the truth. Moreover, he perceived religion, with its suppression of violence, as mediator of the societal and personal, the public and the private, conflicts between Eros and Thanatos. Later works indicate Freud's pessimism about the future of civilization. Freud believed the ego employs the reality principle by seeking to please the id's drive in realistic ways that will bring long term benefit rather than grief. As the ego "attempts to mediate between id and reality, it often cloaks the unconscious urges of the id with its own (preconscious) rationalizations, to conceal the id's conflicts with reality, to profess...to be taking notice of reality even when the id has remained rigid and unyielding." Allowing the individual to defer instant gratification, the reality principle is the governing principle of the actions taken by the ego, after its development from a "pleasure-ego" into a "reality-ego".
The ego's task is to find a balance between primitive drives and reality while satisfying the id and super-ego. Its main concer is with the individual's safety. It allows some of the id's desires to be expressed when their consequences are marginal. "Thus the ego, driven by the id, confined by the super-ego, repulsed by reality, struggles...in bringing about harmony among the forces and influences working in and upon it," and readily "breaks out in anxiety - realistic anxiety regarding the external world, moral anxiety regarding the super-ego, and neurotic anxiety regarding the strength of the passions in the id."
The ego has to do its best to suit all three and is thus constantly feeling hemmed in. The ego seems to be more loyal to the id, preferring to gloss over the finer details of reality to minimize conflicts while pretending a regard for reality. But the super-ego is constantly watching and punishes the Ego with feelings of guilt, and anxiety. To overcome this the ego employs many defense mechanisms from denial and rationalization to fantasy that lessen the tension by masking threatening impulses when id behavior conflicts with social expectations.
The Super-Ego
The super-ego reflects the internalization of cultural rules, mainly taught by parents applying their guidance and influence. For Freud "the installation of the super-ego can be described as a successful instance of identification with the parental agency," while as development proceeds "the super-ego also takes on the influence of those who have stepped into the place of parents - educators, teachers, and people chosen as ideal models", Thus a child's super-ego is constructed on the model of its parents' super-ego and becomes the vehicle of value traditions which propagate themselves from generation to generation.
Parents regularly make important contributions to the formation of character, but in that case they only affect the ego, they no longer influence the super-ego, which has been determined by the earliest parental images. The earlier in development, the greater the estimate of parental power. When one defuses into rivalry with the parental imago, (unconscious mental image) then one feels the ‘dictatorial thou shalt’ to manifest the power the imago represents.
"The super-ego is in close touch with the id and can act as its representative in relation to the ego". People exhibit a sense of guilt that makes them resistant to conquering their pathology. The super-ego condemns the ego - "[displaying] particular severity and [raging] against the ego with the utmost cruelty" and giving it a deepseated, mysterious feeling of guilt. The super-ego includes the individual's ego ideals, spiritual goals, and the psychic agency that criticizes and prohibits drives, fantasies, feelings, and actions. "The super-ego acts as conscience ... It strives to act in a socially appropriate manner, whereas the id wants instant self-gratification." As our moral compass it helps us to act in acceptable ways.
Freud's theory implies that the super-ego is a symbolic internalization of the father figure and cultural regulations. The super-ego and the ego are the product of two key factors: the state of helplessness of the child and the Oedipus complex. Its formation takes place during the dissolution of the Oedipus complex and is formed by identification with and internalization of the father figure. The super-ego retains the character of the father. The stronger the Oedipus complex was and the more rapidly it was repressed by the influence of social authority, the stricter will be the domination of the super-ego over the ego later - in the form of conscience or perhaps of an unconscious sense of guilt.
The super-ego of women "is never so inexorable, so impersonal, so independent of its emotional origins as we require it to be in men...they are often more influenced in their judgements by feelings of affection or hostility." Freud went on to modify his position to the effect "that the majority of men are also far behind the masculine ideal and that all human individuals, as a result of their bisexual disposition and of cross-inheritance, combine in themselves both masculine and feminine characteristics." Freud made use of the castration complex in men and penis envy in women. This can be interpreted as a fear of emasculation in males and an aggressive desire in females. Both tendencies can be evident in both sexes.
Freud's also discusses a "cultural super-ego". He suggested that the demands of the super-ego "coincide with the precepts of the prevailing cultural super-ego." Ethics are a central element in the demands of the cultural super-ego, but Freud (as analytic moralist) protested against what he called "the unpsychological proceedings of the cultural super-ego...the ethical demands of the cultural super-ego. It does not trouble itself enough about the facts of the mental constitution of human beings."
Jung's Relationship to Freud
Jung was born in 1875, Freud's junior by 19 years. In 1900, Jung began working at the Burghölzli psychiatric hospital in Zürich with Eugen Bleuler who was already in communication with Sigmund Freud. Jung sent a copy of his 1906 book Studies in Word Association to Freud and the intense friendship between them developed.
In 1902, five Viennese physicians and close Jewish associates of Freud were invited to meet at his apartment every Wednesday afternoon to discuss issues relating to psychology and neuropathology. This group was called the Wednesday Psychological Society and it marked the beginnings of the worldwide psychoanalytic movement. Max Graf, who joined the group soon after, described the ritual of the early meetings. The last decisive word was always spoken by Freud. There was the atmosphere of the foundation of a religion and Freud was its new prophet who made prevailing methods of psychological investigation appear superficial. By 1906, the group had grown to sixteen members. That year Freud began a correspondence with Jung who had become an acclaimed researcher. In 1907, Jung and a colleague travelled to Vienna to meet Freud and attend the group. They established a small group in Zürich.
In 1911, the first women were admitted to the Vienna Society, including Sabina Spielrein. Prior to the completion of her studies, at Zürich University she had been Jung's patient. The daughter of Jewish Russian doctors, Spielrein was admitted to the Burghölzli mental hospital where Jung, who had wed two years previously, worked. While there for almost a year, she established an intimate relationship with Jung, who was later her medical dissertation advisor on schizophrenia. When Jung's breach of professional ethics became known, he left his position at Burghölzli. Spielrein continued to work with Jung until 1912, when she married a Russian Jewish physician. She was elected a member of Freud's Vienna Psychoanalytic Society and eventually returned to Russia. She and her two daughters were shot in a synagogue by a Nazi SS death squad in 1942.
Two years after Freud and Jung met, they toured the U.S. together, which culminated in what the American Psychological Association calls "the most famous conference in the history of American psychology." In 1912, however, Jung published Psychology of the Unconscious, which diverged from Freud and their personal and professional relationship fractured. Several of Freud's followers defected over a period of several years. After their break in 1913, Jung went through a difficult and pivotal psychological transformation, exacerbated by the outbreak of the First World War. Henri Ellenberger called Jung's intense experience a "creative illness" and compared it favorably to Freud's own period of what he called neurasthenia and hysteria.
Jung's Approach to Analytical Psychology
Although Jung's early work was generally consistent with Freud's, his thoughts about the unconscious were taking a very different direction. He called it "analytical psychology" to distinguish it. Jung's work and personal experiences also convinced him that life has a spiritual purpose beyond material goals. Based on his study of global spiritual traditions he considered life a journey of transformation, which he called a process of individuation at the mystical heart of all religions. It is a journey of self-realization associated with the Divine.
While Jung worked on his Psychology of the Unconscious, tensions grew with Freud because of their disagreements over the nature of libido and religion. Jung focused on the collective unconscious as the part of the unconscious that contains memories and ideas that Jung believed are historically implicit in the human condition. While he agreed with Freud that the libido is important for personal growth he claimed there is more to it than sexual influences. Jung believed his personal development was influenced by factors unrelated to sexuality,
Jung and Freud had very different concepts of the unconscious. According to Jung, Freud conceived the unconscious solely as a repository of repressed emotions and desires. What Jung called the "personal unconscious" is consistent with Freud's model but he considered it overshadowed by what he called the "collective unconscious". The latter is a synchronous process involving archetypes that influence humans over space and time. This requires that archetypes are energy patterns with timeless characteristics that can unconsciously influence people regardless of their location or personal history. Freud had actually mentioned a collective level of psychic functioning but saw it as an appendix to the rest of the psyche.
Letters they exchanged show Freud's refusal to consider Jung's ideas. This rejection caused what Jung described as a "resounding censure". Everyone he knew dropped away except for two of his colleagues. Jung described his book as "an attempt, only partially successful, to create a wider setting for medical psychology and to bring the whole of the psychic phenomena within its purview." (The book was later revised and retitled Symbols of Transformation in 1922.)
Following their break in 1913, at the age of thirty-eight, Jung experienced a horrible "confrontation with the unconscious". He saw visions and heard voices. He worried at times that he was "menaced by a psychosis" or was "doing a schizophrenia". He decided that it was valuable experience and, in private, he induced hallucinations or, in his words, "active imaginations". Jung recorded his private notes of these experiences in a red book, over a period of sixteen years. Some of his analytical concepts derived from these observations Ulrich Hoerni, Jung's grandson, finally decided to publish it to raise funds needed for the Philemon Foundation to prepare Jung's life's works for publication.
Jung's Personal History
His father Paul was an impoverished rural pastor in the Swiss Reformed Church and his mother Emilie was the youngest child of a distinguished Basel churchman and academic. Both were the youngest of thirteen siblings. Emilie was a depressed woman who said that spirits visited her at night, although she was normal in daytime. Jung recalled that at night his mother became strange and mysterious. He reports in his autobiography that one night he saw a faintly luminous figure coming from her room with a head detached and floating in the air in front of the body. He was closer to his father. Emilie's condition improved when they relocated closer to her family when Carl Jung was four. When he was nine, his sister Johanna Gertrud (known as Trudi) was born and eventually became his secretary.
Jung was an introverted child who liked solitude. From childhood, he believed that, like his mother, he had two personalities - a modern Swiss citizen and a personality more suited to the 18th century. "Personality Number 1", as he termed it, was a typical schoolboy living in the era of the time. "Personality Number 2" was a dignified, authoritative and influential man from the past. Although Jung described himself as close to both parents in his autobiography, he was disappointed by his father's academic approach to faith and apprehensive about his mother's condition. Both factors were relevant to his later work.
As a child he made certain totems and messages in a secret language that brought him a feeling of peace and security. As he reports in his autobiography, they were strikingly similar to practices of distant indigenous cultures that he knew nothing about at the time. His later work about symbols, archetypes, and the collective unconscious were inspired, in part, by these early experiences. He also reports a school incident when he was twelve when he momentarily lost consciousness after being pushed to the ground by another boy, although he conceded it was his fault. He disliked school, and when he began having fainting spells on his way to school and doing homework, he stayed home for six months. After overhearing his father talking about his future need to support himself, he began to study assiduously and overcame his fainting spells. He later recalled, "(this) was when I learned what a neurosis is."
When Jung was three past he dreamed about descending to an underground stone chamber in a green meadow containing a sumptuously rich golden throne upon which stood an erectile penis about twelve to fifteen feet high. On the very top of the phallus head was a single eye, gazing upward. He heard his mother's voice calling from outside, "Yes, just look at him. That is the man-eater!" He awoke scared to death. It was only much later he realized he had dreamed of a phallus, and decades later he recognized that it had been a ritual phallus. It could be considered a fertility symbol of the earth mother related to what Jung later called the animus archetype. In any case, it indicates that at an early age his conscious and unconscious were diverging from normal thinking concerning both Christianity and the natural world.
In 1895, Jung began to study medicine at the University of Basel. A year later father Paul died leaving the family dependent on relatives who contributed to Jung's studies. In 1900, he began working at the Burghölzli psychiatric hospital in Zürich with Eugen Bleuler. Jung's dissertation, published in 1903, was titled On the Psychology and Pathology of So-Called Occult Phenomena. During World War I, Jung was drafted as an army doctor and made commandant of an internment camp for British officers and soldiers. The Swiss, being neutral, were obliged to intern personnel from either side who crossed their frontier.
Jung married Emma Rauschenbach, seven years his junior, in 1903. They had four daughters and a son. Despite limited education, Emma took a strong interest in her husband's work and assisted him, becoming a noted analyst in her own right, and enduring his close relationships with other women. Upon her father's death in 1905, Emma and her sister inherited the International Watch Company, manufacturers of luxury time-pieces. Emma's brother-in-law became the main proprietor, but as major shareholders, the thriving business ensured the Jung family's financial security. Emma died of cancer in 1955 at age 73, six years before Carl.
Key Concepts of Jung's Analytical Psychology
Synchronicity: It is an acausal principle as a basis for the apparently random simultaneous occurrence of phenomena. Synchronous events transcend linear transmission through space and time. Similarities in thought and behaviour recur in diverse cultures often at different periods of history in as well as personal coincidences that link relevant events and people. It is also evident in the historical record.
Archetypes: They are synchronously recurring mental themes with universal characteristics. Jung identified their recurrence in religious art, mythology and fairy tales across cultures as highly developed elements of the collective unconscious. He understood archetypes as universal, archaic patterns and images that derive from the collective unconscious and are the psychic counterpart of instinct. As inherited potentials they are actualized when they enter consciousness as images or manifest in behaviour on interaction with the outside world.
Complex: The personal repressed or unconscious core pattern of emotions, memories, perceptions, and wishes organized around a common theme that governs perception and behaviour. Jung included the ego in a comprehensive theory of complexes. He said "by ego | understand a complex of ideas which constitutes the center of my field of consciousness and appears to possess a high degree of continuity and identity. Hence I also speak of an ego-complex". Freud's view was limited to the Oedipus and Electra complexes.
Extraversion and introversion: Jung's perspective suggests that everyone has both an extraverted side and an introverted side, with one being more dominant than the other. Rather than focusing on interpersonal behaviour in the popular sense, Jung defined introversion as an "attitude-type characterized by orientation in life through subjective psychic contents" (focus on one's inner psychic activity) and extraversion as "an attitude type characterized by concentration of interest on the external object (the outside world).
Shadow: Jung's shadow can include everything outside consciousness, and may be positive or negative. "Everyone carries a shadow and the less it is embodied in the individual's conscious life, the blacker and denser it is." The shadow is prone to psychological projection, in which a perceived personal inferiority is recognized as a perceived moral deficiency in someone else. Jung writes that if these projections remain hidden, "The projection-making factor (the Shadow archetype) then has a free hand and can realize its object - if it has one - or bring about some other situation characteristic of its power." These projections insulate and harm individuals by acting as a constantly thickening veil of illusion between the ego and the real world. The shadow may be positive and the seat of creativity.
Collective unconscious: In addition to our immediate consciousness, which is of a thoroughly personal nature and which we believe to be the only empirical psyche (even if we tack on the personal unconscious as an appendix), there exists a second psychic system of a collective, universal, and impersonal nature which is identical in all individuals. This collective unconscious does not develop individually but is inherited. It consists of pre-existent forms, the archetypes, which can only become conscious secondarily and which give definite form to certain psychic contents.
Anima and animus: They are archetypal elements of the collective unconscious, a domain of the unconscious that transcends the personal psyche. In the unconscious of a man, the anima finds expression as a feminine inner personality. In the unconscious of a woman the animus is expressed as a masculine inner personality Because a male's sensitivity is often lesser or repressed, the anima is one of the most significant autonomous complexes of all. It is said to manifest itself by appearing in dreams. It influences a man's interactions with women and his attitudes toward them and vice versa for women and the animus. Jung identified four levels in each from physical attraction of the opposite sex to spiritual wisdom.
The Self: The Self is one of the Jungian archetypes, signifying the unification of consciousness and unconsciousness in a person, and representing the psyche as a whole. The Self is realized as the product of individuation, which in Jung's view is the process of integrating one's personality. What distinguishes Jungian psychology is the idea that there are two centers of the personality. The ego is the center of consciousness, whereas the Self is the center of the total personality, which includes consciousness, the unconscious, and the ego. The Self is both the whole and the center.
Individuation: Its the process in which the individual self develops out of an undifferentiated unconscious seen as a developmental psychic process during which innate elements of personality, the components of the immature psyche, and the experiences of the person's life become integrated over time into a well-functioning whole. "In general, it is the process by which individual beings are formed and differentiated [from other human beings}; in particular, it is the development of the psychological individual as a being distinct from the general, collective psychology." individuation is a process of transformation whereby the personal and collective unconscious are brought into consciousness (e.g., by means of dreams, active imagination, or free association) to be assimilated into the whole personality. Individuation has a holistic healing effect on the person, both mentally and physically. It is a completely natural process necessary for the integration of the psyche.
The Persona: Jung regarded the persona as the social face the individual presents to the world. It is "a kind of mask, designed on the one hand to make a definite impression upon others, and on the other to conceal the true nature of the individual". The development of a viable social persona is part of adapting to, and preparing for, adult life in the social world. A strong ego relates to the outside world through a flexible persona; identification with a specific persona (doctor, scholar, artist, etc.) inhibits psychological development. Thus "the danger is that people become identical with their personas - the professor with his textbook, the tenor with his voice." The result is its excessive concern for 'what people think'. It is an unreflecting state of mind in which people are unconscious of their distinction in the world.
Summary
Everyone practices psychoanalysis to some extent. Exposure to others over time brings general impressions of their characteristics such as clever, dull, honest, dishonest, good, bad, trustworthy, deceitful, and so on. These general impressions influence our interpersonal relationships, although we are usually able to mask them or evade confrontation in the interests of peace, or to avoid personal compromise, in navigating our way through life. They may be impressions founded on solid evidence, they may partly be projections of one's own shortcomings, they may be biased, they may be intuitive feelings that one picks up that others project, they may reflect a personal agenda or a spectrum of desires, or any combination of factors that may make us either a good or a bad judge of character. In our own best interests it can therefore be helpful to understand how our own judgement can be influenced. A general review of how a professional psychoanalyst treats stressful conditions that arise in their patients can be helpful. Although Freud and Jung have been summarized above there are many others who have developed divergent theories and techniques although there are common elements between them. In general, these have been listed as follows:
1. a person's development is determined by often forgotten events in early childhood, rather than by inherited traits alone;
2. human behaviour and cognition is largely determined by irrational drives that are rooted in the unconscious;
3. attempts to bring those drives into awareness triggers resistance in the form of defense mechanisms, particularly repression,
4. conflicts between conscious and unconscious material can result in mental disturbances such as neurosis, neurotic traits, anxiety and depression;
5. unconscious material can be found in dreams and unintentional acts, including mannerisms and slips of the tongue;
6. liberation from the effects of the unconscious is achieved by bringing this material into the conscious mind through therapeutic intervention;
7. transference is an important part of the psychoanalytic process, whereby patients relive infantile conflicts by projecting onto the analyst feelings of love, dependence and anger.
In Part Two, the author reviews some highly unusual personal experiences, some cosmic revelations, and some developments of the brain sciences since the work of Freud and Jung that will illustrate the validity of some of the concepts as well as some of their limitations.
Part Two
Some Early Personal History
My background is a little unusual and may be relevant to what came later. My paternal grandfather left the Ottawa Valley to pioneer a homestead in 1876, the year the first road opened from southern Ontario north to Lake Nipissing. He continued to an area named after the Algonquin Restoule clan. There was no road the last few miles, just survey lines through the forest. There was a supply outpost 2 miles away. He built a log cabin and returned in the spring for his wife who then had a six month old daughter. It was over a five hundred mile trip by ox cart. They were the first white woman and child ever to cross the Restoule River.
The homestead fronted on a beautiful lake and a few native families who lived on the lakes helped them initially. They raised eight children, my father being the youngest son. When he married in 1914 my parents took over the farm. My father had little formal education. My mother was from a wilderness area 28 miles away. They made her the school teacher when she finished grade ten at age fourteen because they could not find a regular teacher for her one room log school. Later she went to teach in Restoule. By this time there were spare bedrooms in the eight bedroom farmhouse on a hill with a panoramic view of the lake.
In 1929, my parents began building housekeeping cottages along the extensive lakefront at the urging of a wandering traveler from the USA. American families drove five to six hundred miles for their summer vacations to swim, fish, and relax, all through the depression and war years, the same people returning year after year. When I was born in 1936 it was already a thriving business along with the farm. We raised cattle, pigs, sheep, chickens, and so on and had huge vegetable gardens. There was a large bam attached to the original log barn sufficient to store hay and oats for the severe winter months. Everything was done with horses. Being close to nature was very much in my blood.
My baby crib in the log and frame farmhouse was in a bedroom adjacent to the large dining room where my mother served three meals a day to tourists during summer vacation time. I was born April 25 and she had to leave me alone for long periods. The walls and ceiling of the room were covered with metal sheeting commercially stamped in a square pattern of about 16 squares to a square foot. Its purpose was to allow time to escape a possible fire.
Mother said I never cried. She did not want the tourists to make a fuss over me and all summer they never discovered I was in the next room to where they ate. I was engrossed for hours on end mentally rearranging those squares into larger squares, rectangles, triangles and other shapes of various sizes. I clearly remember wondering at this strange capacity of my mind. I kept marveling at how my mind was separate from my thoughts when I could not have been more than two to four months old.
A few months later I vividly remember learning to stand up. I can still see my hands gripping the wooden bars of my crib tugging myself up. Along the top rail of the crib there was a decal of a little boy and a girl with a dog chasing a ball and I so much wanted to be like them. I clearly remember curiously wondering why my legs were so wobbly, while I repeatedly fell back on my diapered bottom. I could think clearly in conceptual terms without language.
At age two, while standing in the big farmhouse kitchen, I vividly recall tugging at the hem of my mother's skirt and insisting on knowing what the word "tomorrow" meant. I sensed it was a very important word. The hired girl was leaving and said she would return tomorrow. "Hush! I am talking to Zelda," Mom said. But I had to know and I kept tugging at the hem of her dress. Mother finally bent over and patiently explained that I know what yesterday means. And I know what today means. Then, she said tomorrow follows yesterday and today.
There was suddenly a field of dark energy superimposed on my vision of the room. I intuitively recognized that energy field as the timeless duration of being embracing past and future. In other words, being has no beginning or end in the boundless expanse of duration through time. I was satisfied that I understood "time" as the duration of Being, but not in the linear way that others normally do. The duration was there all at once in that dark energy field. I never gave it another thought until age 32 when I experienced the timeless Void. The dark energy field was superimposed on the form of the room, not vice versa. It was therefore not like the Void but it carried a similar message. I do not know if these early experiences are related to what came three decades later, but they may have helped in some way.
Despite a spectrum of clear memories from infancy, I have no memories of infantile erotic fantasies of my mother or jealous rejection of my father. I was close to both parents. There is compelling evidence that the Oedipus complex is a common phenomenon but it is not universal. In those days there was no need for my parents to monitor me closely. By the time I was seven, I sometimes went off exploring deep in the forest beyond the back pasture. I spent alot of time with my father who patiently taught me a lot, as well as mother. There was a two room school with about fifteen pupils in each room when I went. Grades 1 to 5 were in one room and grades 5 to 10 in the other, with the grades arranged in rows. There was a good spirit of mutual cooperation that you don't find in a city. Electricity came when I was fifteen.
A Quest Into Business Organization
A revelatory experience, about how the cosmic order works, first came as a result of a prolonged intensive effort to understand the nature of a business organization. After graduating from the University of Toronto as a Chemical Engineer in 1958, I soon accepted an offer to work with a natural gas utility company in the steel city of Hamilton and the surrounding area between Toronto and St. Catherine's. It was a rapidly growing franchise area. Having acquired some limited experience with a corrosion consultant, I was assigned sole responsibility for corrosion and leakage control in the company at the age of 22. I accepted the job not realizing how drastic the situation was. Natural gas had just arrived from western Canada, and after conversion, the fifty year old manufactured gas mains dried out. A house had just blown up killing two people. Most of the city was at serious risk. The leak count was infinite and most of them were unfixable. The situation required the redesign and replacement of the entire pipeline distribution system through many hundreds of miles of city streets.
Consequently, my responsibilities expanded rapidly until I was responsible for directing the design, planning, construction, maintenance, and general operation of the entire buried system. The job fell to me, with indispensable support from a few old timers.
The organization had chaotically exploded many times in size over night. There was no order to it. I found myself directing the work of hundreds of gas company and contractor employees. Most of us were young and everyone pitched in to create the needed organization. New departments, new methods, and communications had to be established. After a number of years working long hours, a smooth running safe organization resulted. Then, while approaching my late twenties, a political battle involving a hostile takeover ensued for several years in which I was a key management figure. After the highly charged company takeover was finally consummated, the political battle became very intense.
The new parent company, although a much larger sprawling company, had serious problems. They nevertheless wanted to centralize operations to the point where we would lose control over the safe operation of our much more concentrated franchise area with rapid population growth. Their staff organization of over 300 experts, at a head office two hundred miles distant, had no line authority over me. I was expected to voluntarily agree with measures that I knew would not work in our context, and counter suggestions were not accepted.
I had human resources at my disposal and as the struggle became very intense, I undertook a detailed quantitative study of every formal and informal communication in the entire company, in an effort to show decisively that the system the new parent company wanted to impose would not work. It would not provide us with the communications we needed to function and it would leave us without direct access to essential records. We would lose control of our mapping system and warehouse. It would reduce us to drones following mindless directives from afar. It would throw us back into chaos, while many tens of thousands of pieces of paper would flow into their new marble head office.
I had just finished compiling the report which was condensed into a couple hundred pages of charts and tables. I had the full support of my boss. He was a remarkable manager who gave me a completely free hand. After it was finally submitted to head office, I was exhausted and my mind was in a tumult, churning with new possibilities. I felt on the brink of something immense. And something immense is what happened.
Organic Union
One evening after the report was submitted | came home from work feeling drained. My thought processes had been challenged at the demands of intuitively grasping the integrated operation of the company as a whole while questioning how every detail fit with the whole. I was mentally and emotionally exhausted. | entered my apartment where I lived alone and immediately lay down on the sofa, my hands folded across my chest.
Almost at once the tension and turmoil of the preceding months fell away. My attention fell to the rhythmic rise and fall of my breathing of its own accord and a feeling of peace came over me. Then I became aware of a form to the form of my body. The harmony of breathing gradually enveloped my whole body with a wondrous feeling that filled every fiber of my being. A vibrant golden light began to glow within my chest and it blossomed forth to fill my mind and engulf my whole body and being in a field of golden light.
Then, in what seemed a most ordinary fashion, a mirror image of my face appeared before me in rich, full color. It was just my head and face, looking impartially and intently at myself. The eyes of my mirror image were looking directly into my own eyes as if they were open, as I lay there with my eyes closed. My face just quietly appeared, then faded in a moment leaving me immersed in a formless ecstasy of living gold. The face was a visual presentation of my true self. It was my personal archetype.
As I opened my eyes, it was like having been asleep from birth and waking up for the first time. Everything was bathed in living light that worked in and through it, making it what itis. Every cell in my body was in organic union with the form to the form of my body. The walls of the room were cast in living light that filled the air. I could see the vital energies teeming within everything. It went on like this continuously for five days. The energy transformations of all living processes were illuminated and visually apparent in meticulous transforming details that were infinitely complex. Jung might say I was in union with the Earth Mother archetype. I was in union with the whole biosphere.
The Human Archetype
It was as I was sitting alone in my apartment one night, that the rapturous experience of organic union came to an end, As it gradually faded I had the feeling that something was turning around, The end was in fact the beginning of something new, another side. I received a direct and unmistakable telepathic message. There was a severe intensity to it. It was startling.
"You have seen my face and now you will do my bidding."
What was this sudden invasion of what I regarded as my privacy? Was my own mind not private? I instinctively had the ability to project a reply in similar telepathic fashion.
"I haven't seen any face."
Suddenly the walls of the room again became transparent but they were not filled with living light. There was a transparent spatial depth extending indeterminately beyond the filmy veil of the wall. Then a face appeared directly in front of my eyes. I was aware that something was backwards, the inverse of what it should be. The face appeared after the message which was in the past tense. Time was backwards. Something had tuned around.
The face was looking directly at me. It was three or four feet in front of me. It was ghosttlike in appearance with fuzzy edges, but it was a real living being. It had an incredible presence that extended indefinitely in a two dimensional plane that boundlessly embraced humanity with the face in the center. I could see through it, like looking back at history through time and space. It was the face, the head, the neck, and the shoulders, of a smallish aging man. I was aware of an intuitive connection between us. I was a part of it and it was a part of me. The face implicitly embraced the whole of humanity, from the genesis of human history up to the present. It was the genotype of the human species. Iwas a universal archetype associated with every human being who has ever lived. twas a holy ghost you might say, from the collective unconscious.
I intuitively knew that this being was the universal archetypal form to the form of my body. I also knew that this genotype of the human species subsumes and integrates all organically living energy processes on the planet. Union with it was union with our natural heritage, with the whole of life, with every bird and beast, with the air itself, and with every human being who has ever lived. Now I was seeing the other side. I was seeingit face to face, objectively out there apart from me. The depth of the face was written in human suffering - incredible suffering. It was terribly scarred by tragic events that reached back countless thousands of years. Looking backwards from the present through the whole of human history, I could feel the depth of its immense suffering. I was seeing and feeling our collective human unconscious.
In spite of this social burden of mankind from its inception, the face embodied a will of absolute impartiality, Suddenly I became graphically aware of the future that it knew it faced. Impending events are cataclysmic. I could sense them viscerally and see inferences of them reflected in the face. They are staggering in their proportions and consequences for the whole human race. This archetype of the whole of humanity may not survive. It appeared that it could not survive the way things are headed. It was bowel wrenchingly fearsome. This imposed an extreme severity to the presence of the being that it sustained with gargantuan strength and depth. As the face faded from view, I again replied to the being through deliberately formulated words in my mind. I might have asked what bidding it had in mind, but I didn't. I rejected the message completely.
"I dont care who you are, it’s not right for anyone to impose their will on another."
The response was automatic. I'd been fighting this for several years. We must be personally responsible for our actions. I retreated to another room but my feet were stopped in their tracks.
The Void
Suddenly all organic feedback from my emotional apparatus to my cerebral mental processes was suspended. I had stepped outside of humanity. I had a clear visual perception into an indeterminate formless distance that could be seen right through the walls of the room. The room lost its substantiality, becoming but a filmy transparent veneer over a vast and shining sea of mist. I was gazing into the boundless Void that is the other side of the universe of Form
A series of intuitive realizations were intentionally fed to me from a source other than the tragic face of humanity. Organic feedback that normally fills our mental processes ceased to function. Personal thought was impossible. Then everything vanished completely! The room, the universe, my body, all vanished completely! There was no loss of identity. I was One with All in the awesome timeless Void that integrates cosmic history. There was no heavenly bliss, no pain, no loss, no gain or sorrow. All was balanced in a field of pure timeless being and wonder.
In a moment everything returned again as a thin transparent veneer, but only for a few seconds. Then everything was gone again. This happened several times in succession. I intuitively sensed that Someone was switching the entire universe on and off to deliberately show me that there is a reciprocal correspondence between the transient world of Form and the Void that spans and integrates the whole of history as a boundless and timeless reality.
God Demonstrates the Nature of Wholeness
Next that Someone appeared directly in front of me, about eight feet away, but not part of the world of material form. He was an indescribable and Supremely Intelligent Being, pure living energy filled with a magnificence beyond all reproach. He was suddenly hovering there immaculately ordered, seeing and knowing all, balanced and impartial. He began to emanate friendliness toward me, like meeting a genuine friend only much more so Then unrestrained mercy came streaming from Him in a torrent that changed to compassion, then a deluge of infinite love came gushing freely from His entire being. None of this came from me.
This Supreme Being transcended and subsumed the Void as a living embodiment of Universal Values. He transcended the whole of space and time, the whole of cosmic history. He was the living source of the universe without beginning or end in space and time. He was God. It was impossible to rationalize anything in His presence, impossible even to think that one could not rationalize. Rejection of the Being was impossible, unthinkable. There can be no being with separate thoughts or feelings in the presence of the Supreme Being. I saw as with my eyes, just as I would look at a tree, or another person, and yet it transcended physical existence God was simply prepared to make me the gift of a revelatory insight into the whole creative process.
He increased the intensity of His living texture, became slightly smaller, and moved up and away alittle, then He changed to a complete independence of everything, an unthinkable freedom beyond all conceptions. He transcended the whole of creation, the whole universe, the whole of history, the whole of space and time. Itis impossible to overstate this.
Then at His will came a transmission, like a bullet of energy. The world vanished completely with Him beside and alittle above me. A thin wand of energy suddenly extended an endless distance out from His center, like a projection of His will. It swept quickly in a limitless arc through the Void as a universe of stars appeared ina great spiral galaxy. I was transported to intergalactic space gasping in awe at the immense spiral swirl, with God beside me. I was one Particular human being in company with the ONE Universal Supreme Being that subsumes the whole cosmic order. God is another word for the Cosmic Order.
With God still in my field of vision the Void bifurcated into two titanic power masses as if an infinite sphere of energy had been ripped in two, and the top half placed underneath the bottom half. Together these hemispheres were a Rift in Universal Wholeness balanced by a thread of living light from which all creation derives Maintaining this living balance between the hemispheres bridges the Rift in Wholeness and thus preserves Universal Wholeness. No sooner was this recognized than the huge masses of sheer power began to quake on the verge of horrendous instability. The entire universe was suddenly in jeopardy, facing destruction if the balance of energies could not be maintained. The desperate thought came that there was some personal responsibility for maintaining the balance, but the energies were infinitely beyond my capacity to control. My conscious mind was ripped open in an impossible effort to balance the tension. Then when all was lost the Supreme Being intervened.
God is Supreme Consuming the Void
The Supreme Being became unlimited universal power exceeding all of the forces of the universe combined Size, distance and magnitude lost relevance. The hemispheres were gone as He began to consume the Void He transcended all creation including the Void. He began drawing the energies of the Void unto Himself revealing a pitch black emptiness beyond. He became an Absolute Center of very bright, intensely active energy, in an Absolute Periphery of pitch black emptiness, as more and more of the Void was being consumed He was a Supreme Active Energy Interface between a Universal Inside and a Universal Outside transcending all creation. He was yang and yin. The quantum energies of the Void were elements of memory embracing all Being. There was No Being apart from His Supreme Being. It was apparent that the Void embraces the whole of experience, everything that has ever been in cosmic history. He was light and darkness in All Being. He was Eros and Thanatos both.
God was bringing creation to a final end before a witness as great tongues of the Void flew into Him. As the tension became unbearable a bottomless tunnel-like well opened in the energies of the Void, from my eyes down through the transparency of my body and beyond. I could visually see a two dimensional transparent interface that bisected my body back to front and that extended beyond the confines of my transparent body. It distinguished a subjective Inside behind from an objective Outside in front. I could visually see the well behind the interface through me, even though my eyes were frozen on the Supreme Being in front and above me
He could not complete the awesome spectacle or there could be no distinctions between Self and Other than Self. There could be no phenomena at all. He had intervened to restore a balance. Somehow I was granted the will to turn away in an act of utter desperation to stave off the destruction of the universe. The active interface through the mid-coronal plane of my body had turned around. I could visually see God behind me now as another bullet of energy came speeding across the inner space between us to impinge through the back of my head. A tunnel-like bottomless well through the energies of the Void opened in front of me now. Almost at once there was a wheel of energy to my right, churning over with great momentum. Cycles of birth and death were born from the Void and returned to the Void, turning over like a flywheel vertically beside me. Faces and fragments of human bodies were being reborn and horribly mangled by their own emotional identifications and doing it again and again with gleaming grinning faces. Horrors devouring horrors with indulgent delight!
Some Memories Have Eternal Value
A “dark transparent finger" visibly reached out of the Void at His will and touched a tiny spot in my transparent back to release associated energy from the Void. The energy rose into my head, became very intense, then it went streaming out through my eyes as they watched on in disbelief. As it streamed out a few meters into my visual field in front it became a structured pattern of transforming energies a few feet in diameter. It was a visible idea, a memory from experience replicated in color by several two dimensional interfaces that transformed through a sequence. It happened a few times to demonstrate how memories are formed and recalled.
Then a city of light appeared in brilliant color. It was suspended in the Void such that the underside of the city along its nearest edge was at first visible, with dark tendrils of energy reaching into the Void, like roots from which it was recreated from history and assimilated at Will by the Supreme Being behind me. As my perspective rose above the city dark abstractions of energy rose through my body as before but originating from the Void beneath and behind the active interface associated with the mid-coronal plane through my transparent body. As they projected out through my eyes, the intensity was severe as the ideas went flying down into the city assisting in its completion again and again. Then other ideas began flying down into the city from different points in the Void, from unknown people and places. It was a work in progress to demonstrate some contributions have eternal value.
The city gave way to a magnificent landscape as my perspective rose high above it. it too was brilliantly illuminated in vivid color. It extended out to a distant horizon as far as I could see, with very high wooded hills in the distance, a river flowing along the base of a high precipice, with areas of semi-desert in the foreground. Packets of energy started flying from various points in the Void down into it, completing it and filling it out. A world of light was being integrated through commitments made, their energies preserved for recall in the timeless Void.
More Sequences
More sequences followed that are difficult to describe. A series of eruptions of direct knowing came in spontaneous bursts of light. The knowing was implicit in the light that united inside and outside without visually explicit content. They came many times in succession embracing the physical, biological and social sciences, including evolution, relativity and related subjects. Then they turned to bursts of insight into the System by which the whole cosmic order works. There was nothing that could not be known. Those bottomless wells into the Void gave me unlimited access. The more | had access the greater the tension and the greater my access.
All of this was orchestrated by the Supreme Being behind me. He suddenly seemed to drop me, so far as controlling my experience was concerned. As He did, I could see a jungle of energies coarse and oppressive come swarming in from the Void to inundate me, energies of the normal social milieu in which we function Uncontrollable energies began coursing through my body in wild ragged patterns like huge serpents snaking through my whole being, shaking the foundations of my being. I became gripped with the thought that complete madness must have seized my mind. But even a belief in madness was madness. This was part of the experience too. The Supreme Being must have known that I could not deny what had happened
Again and again the tension in my mind built to extremes, then break, with the whole of existence slipping away in a vortex. I would capture the tension again, holding on until it broke again, everything spinning away in waves of nausea, then I would capture it again. My capacity to survive was stretched beyond the breaking point many times. I needed words to hold the tension. I had to bridge the hemispheres, establish some contact between them. And words did come: "Everything is, and it is not, it both is and is not, and it neither is nor is not."
A Search for Rational Understanding
I was left in a bad way. Fortunately I got urgent medical help that scrambled my perceptions and helped me through the next few weeks. I was walking on eggs, so to speak, for many months. I was highly sensitized to the feelings and intentions of others, as well as my own. I could not discuss it with anyone. The experience begged to be given expression, yet language was hopelessly inadequate. A search of the literature for others who may have had similar experiences turned up references to the Void but little else that could help directly.
There had to be a way of communicating the System and | turned back to the experience that revealed it. I also began to research the sciences and their philosophical underpinnings in great depth. More experiences came of their own accord over a couple decades, all of them involving God and the Void. All of them were awesomely cosmic in nature as distinct from organic as in the first five days of joyous union. Nearly all of them were relevant to the task of delineating and communicating what I later called the "System" of delineating the cosmic order.
I fortunately discovered the research of Paul MacLean on the ancient limbic brain and what he called the schizoid split between emotion and intellect. Intellect is indebted to the evolution of the newer hemispheres that bloomed above the old emotional brain, folded around the top of the brain stem. The limbic brain is intimately connected to our emotional autonomic nervous system, while the new brain has no direct biological controls over it. Emotion and intellect are constrained to live in the same house together and often do not get along. The old brain is filled with largely unconscious ancestral lore while the new brain consciously directs behavior.
At this time I also came across the research of Roger Sperry on patients who had their hemispheres surgically separated for the treatment of severe epilepsy. His seminal article was published just a few months prior. By using a split screen and flashing pictures briefly on one side or the other only one hemisphere would see them Only the left hemisphere in right handed people can speak and verbally respond to images flashed on the right screen. The right hemisphere is mute and unable to verbally reply when an image is flashed on the left screen, and yet it can select the article by touch using the left hand. In short Sperry showed that the mute hemisphere excels at spatial and temporal organization and integration. It has holistic intuitive characteristics that are distinct from the linear logic of the language left hemisphere.
This discovery gave me a valuable structural handle on the challenge that | faced. It became clear to me that we have three independently functioning brains that seek a sustainable creative balance. Our left brain integrates linear sensory input with socially oriented behavior through the use of language. Our right brain intuitively integrates meaning as a structural whole in a way that cannot be reduced to language. It is structurally holistic with timeless characteristics that are resistant to change. It is value oriented and concerns the nature of truth. It thus concerns the cosmic order that determines our sensory perception of phenomenal behavior from which all left brain language derives. This is apparent in ordinary experience, for example if we believe that there is no afterlife we must believe that it is true for everyone who ever lived.
Our ancient emotional limbic brain emotionally fuels both hemispheres while anchoring us to our evolutionary heritage in the biosphere. The evolutionary process is itself structurally determined by the cosmic order and is thus intuitively accessible. So both of my hemispheres were exposed to the visual imagery of the cosmic experiences with great emotional intensity in such a way that it was holistically meaningful to my mute right hemisphere while my left hemisphere was left without language to give it socially meaningful expression Knowing the structural basis of the problem helped a lot, although it took years to structurally delineate the cosmic "System" and confirm its direct relevance to the sciences as well as to why we have three brains in the first place.
The Relationship of Cosmic Order to Freud's Psychoanalysis
There are only nine possible structural ways that four active interfaces can mutually relate with respect to a common inside and outside. I call it System 4. Three of the ways designate Universal Terms. The other six ways are Particular Terms that relate in three polar pairs consistent with Our Three Brains.
Thus we have the anatomical and cosmic order underpinnings for Sigmund Freud's structural thesis that we all have an Id, an Ego and a Super-ego. The emotional limbic brain is the vehicle of Id including the libido or sexual drive, plus other instinctual emotional drives such as hunger and thirst. It also houses emotional experience repressed from consciousness.
The Ego is the conscious part of the brain that employs left brain language to integrate sensory input with explicit thought and behavior. It deals with consciously responding to the linear progression of events in a socially meaningful way. In doing so it recalls appropriate memories that are implicitly coupled to sensory input. Their emotional content fuels left brain Ego activity that tailors them to suit the current circumstance. Behavior must be seen to fit an overriding framework of understanding that evolves with experience.
Our frameworks of understanding are generally an intuitive sense of what is fitting behavior or what is consistent with a holistic world view that we implicitly entertain. It is a right brain concern with universal values that we intuitively perceive. Expressing it in language as a closed belief system is never successful as fascist and communist movements have shown. We may feel that killing is wrong and yet feel justified in marching off to war in unusual circumstances. Likewise religions tend to turn into their own social caricatures. In short right brain holistic world views embody our moral sense of conscience. The Super-ego concerns the cosmic order.
The common danger is that strong emotional attachment to a specific social result. This can include an excessive blind romantic attachment, or an exclusive cultural or political agenda. This kind of emotional identification turns any agenda into a framework of understanding and short circuits right brain intuitive insight. It results in an imbalance between Eros and Thanatos that invites future negative consequences to restore a balance. There is no paradise to be found in social circumstance on this side of the veil. We easily fall victim to our own emotionally generated illusions.
Freud's bold structure is generally consistent with our three brains. Moreover the cosmic order derives from active interface processes between a common inside and outside, neither of which can be known to the exclusion of the other. It thus concerns the active relationship of Eros inside to Thanatos outside as Freud postulated, although he did not see it in a cosmic context. Nevertheless Eros and Thanatos seek a balance in the creative expression of our three brains.
The Relationship of Cosmic Order to Jung's Analytical Psychology
Jung accepted Sigmund Freud's general structural outline of the human psyche, including Eros and Thanatos, the Oedipus complex and what he called the complementary Electra complex in women. They began to part ways over Jung's concept of the collective unconscious and related personal and universal archetypes, which require synchronous relationships that transcend linear causal events in space and time. Jung's view of humanity's spiritual aspirations is directly related. Spiritual realities have timeless or eternal characteristics that relate to all people throughout history.
His views are generally confirmed by my vision of seeing the face of my true self as a personal archetype followed by five days of organic ecstasy in union with the biosphere. Our collective unconscious embraces our evolutionary origins on the planet. This was confirmed when it turned around and I saw the Suffering Face of Humanity throughout history, reaching back to the dawn of our origin on Earth. It was a stark timeless reality, not a belief or conjecture
After I rejected the message everything vanished and all organic feedback to consciousness stopped completely. What followed was cosmic in nature, not organic. It transcended the whole history of creation itself. With the awesome experience of the Void I was One with All that has ever been. Our collective unconscious embraces that too. Then God appeared and introduced Himself as the living manifestation of Universal Values, mercy, compassion, love and Universal Truth. If there is no such living basis to Truth transcending creation that can be known, there can be no reality apart from arbitrary conflicting opinions without any real basis in personal experience. Our human spiritual quest is more than Freud's fear of death.
The infinite juxtaposed hemispheres represented the distinction between Self and Other, between Inside and Outside, from which all creation proceeds. Its illustrated in the figure below. A bridge between Inside and Outside as One and Many, or Universal and Particular, is a universal structural requirement if there is to be such a thing as Unity to the Universe. By consuming a degenerate component of the energies of the Void to restore a balance to the hemispheres God became a bifurcation of Eros and Thanatos, representing Himself to be the Supreme Source of All Being. There was No Being possible apart from His Being. The degenerate variants were disassembled into these twin aspects of His Supreme Being
We implicitly have free will to make value judgements toward a creative balance between Eros and Thanatos in everything that we do. This allows us to learn from mistakes and evolve. The degenerate variants can be redeemed through renewed commitments to living. Failing that we face reincarnation to try again with a new identity that may eventually lead to redemption. Or we may continue a degenerate spiral with a disintegrating remnant of our former self.
God controlled my right brain intuitive realizations of the holistic meaning in all of this independently of language. Nothing was left to left brain rationalization in language after the event. There was a direct hierarchically nested ink between universal archetypes recalled from the collective unconscious via the ancient limbic brain, and the holistically intuitive right hemisphere, that is, between the Id and the Super-ego. Even though the cosmic experiences transcended creation and my physical body, God explicitly and visually employed my emotional apparatus to reflux memories with emotional content out through my eyes and into my visual field. He was able to do this because he subsumes the Void as the cosmic memory bank of creation.
My problem was that my language left hemisphere visually saw everything too. So my so-called Ego consciousness was left without words to make rational sense of it. This implicitly requires that mute intuitive insight into the timeless and holistic structure of the cosmic order must find confirmation in sensory experience from which all language derives.
Associated with my personal archetype was a two dimensional interface of indefinite extent that bisected me front to back distinguishing a subjective inside from an objective outside. It extended into the Void beyond the confines of my transparent body in a similar way as the two dimensional interface in which the Suffering Face of Humanity was embedded. Recall from the memory bank of the Void comes from the subjective side of the interface and is committed to the objective side as demonstrated by the energies used to complete the city of light.
It should be noted that the emotional limbic brain is intimately connected to both divisions of the autonomic nervous system via the hypothalamus. The sympathetic division works in accord with the language hemisphere by providing archetypally patterned energy to fuel immediate thought and behavior. This corresponds to what Freud and Jung called the pre-conscious or the personal unconscious. These behavioral patterns may be common but they are learned or conditioned by personal experience. They are related to how each person's synaptic nervous connections have become organized by events in their lives. Although the Void is the universal memory bank, the recall process is keyed to the body through them. These personal archetypal behavioral patterns (distinct from the Personal Archetype as it is used here) can include what Jung called the shadow, the persona, the animus and anima, and various complexes.
The parasympathetic division works in accord with the right intuitive hemisphere which is the vehicle of hierarchically nested universal archetypes. This includes the True Self or Personal Archetype as it is nested in the Human Archetype, and as it in tun is nested in the all-inclusive Universal Archetype God. The universal archetypes are not conditioned by experience, do not reside in the body and they are not keyed to the body by synaptic conditioning. They normally constitute the main collective unconscious and they work in mutual tensional restraint with the sympathetic division. They are nevertheless potentially accessible in conscious personal experience in unusual circumstances. This includes organic spiritual experiences of varying degrees, and in especially rare cases it can include cosmic experiences orchestrated by God and employing the Void The only recent cosmic reference I found was a Hindu sannyasin known as the Shivapuri Baba who came to God realization in 1875. He spent 40 years walking around the world to fulfill a promise to his grandfather, meeting many famous people. He died in 1963. In one brief passage in Bennett's book about him he mentions seeing God, oneself, and the universe in a "triple vision," similar to one sequence of what happened to me.
The Hemispheres
Note: A crude diagram cannot begin to convey the intense immensity of the vision as the basis of All Creation. God is illustrated by the circle above me, although it is quite impossible to represent His Being. He manifested about the same relative size to me. The universe had vanished. The living thread balancing the hemispheres demonstrates that all we can ever know are active energy processes between a universal inside and outside, neither of which can be known to the exclusion of the other. This is a requirement of Universal Wholeness. God manifested in other ways in other experiences, always with the same unmistakable presence.
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41. System 4 Terms
