Conscious Transformations in The Structure and Dynamic of the Psyche (1960) and The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious (1959)
Presented on: Thursday, September 3, 1987
Presented by: Roger Weir
The Alchemical Core of C. G. Jung's Work (1916-1956)
Presentation 10 of 13
Conscious Transformations in The Structure and Dynamic of the Psyche (1960); and
The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious (1959)
Presented by Roger Weir
Thursday, September 3, 1987
Transcript:
The date September 3rd 1987. This is the tenth lecture in this series of lectures by Roger Weir at The Philosophical Research Society on the alchemical core of Jung's work. Tonight's lecture is entitled Conscious Transformations in the Structure and Dynamics of His Psyche, 1960. and The Archetypes and Collective Unconscious, 1959.
Green sheets here for a lecture which is related to this series. My good friend Dr. Heller is going to have to be out of the country for five weeks. He's going to New Zealand and other South Pacific rendezvous. And so I'll be doing one of his Friday night lectures September 18th.
Comment from the room: Maybe he'll bring you a hat back.
And he may bring me a hat.
That lecture on the 18th will be about the Aurora Consurgens. The alchemical treatise reportedly, reputedly by Saint Thomas Aquinas written on his deathbed. And I'm taking a particular tack in that lecture. I'm going to discuss Marie-louise von France and her work with Jung as he is alchemical Sorora Mystica, mystical sister. Marie Louise von France was 18 when she met Jung and that was 1934. And it was her alchemical dream that started Jung off. that gave him the the trigger as we have mentioned in this series.
And I guess I should mention that you note that we're talking about the alchemical core of Jung's work. But we're not in any instance putting on the board and numbering alchemical procedures or processes. We're not drawing too many diagrams. We're not talking about alchemy in that way. This is a sophomoric approach. And one that yields actually no experience and no wisdom. The approach that we're taking is one that if you are following all the way through will give you an insight into the way in which Carl Jung's life experience gave him a very privileged insight into the condition of modern man.
Miss von France instead of doing a biography of Carl Jung wrote a book whose title is C.G. Jung but the subtitle is His Myth for our Time. And in here she defines by example what Jung understood by the term spirit. And we have to now raise ourselves up to try to appreciate something rather difficult. She writes here, "The urge to the realization of such instinctive patterns of behavior is to be observed in human beings not only from the outside but also from within. In men and women there appear almost simultaneously with their elementary behavior patterns but in the inner field of vision. Fantasy images, sudden thoughts or notions which are heavily charged with emotion. Inspired ideas and feelings which are like physical impulses to action."
She writes, "The dynamic which produces such inner symbolic patterns in the psyche as what Jung understands by the word spirit." That is to say spirit for Jung was like an invisible amperage which energizes and carries the images and the feelings. So that spirit is not in any way an element which joins two things and thus moves them. But in all instances is an ongoing continuous contextual dynamic so that spirit here for Jung is literally a given.
Further on she introduces a parallel which we had talked about last week a little bit. And which we will finally get around closer this week. And indeed in the next couple of weeks come closer and closer to a major idea, a watershed idea. That in Jung's work has all of the elements of being an ethical making realization. This is how she writes it, "Physical energy obeys the law of entropy as is well known. And every expenditure of energy is accompanied by a certain lowering of the gradient. With an irrevocable loss of energy in the form of heat. Psychic energy also seems to obey this law." So that there is a, there is a correlation through empirical observation. Through scientific analysis and investigation. There is a correlation of physical energy and psychic energy that both seem to obey the law of entropy. That as energy is expended the capacity for that energy to carry on in its previous form is somewhat lower. And Jung often used the term gradient for this. And I think that the image that he would have in mind is that we have an arbitrary starting point and an arbitrary goal. And that psychic energy rises to the goal. But as it rises to the goal in expenditure it tends to lower the gradient.
So there's a kind of a paradox that's hidden here in this understanding. and that is how do we ever get to any goal then? So that the underside of the psychic energy, obeying the law of entropy, is that the spirit as distinct from the psyche increases its energy. And the term for this is a term which Jung borrows from nuclear physics, negentropy. Nagentropy. And so she writes it here, in any case it is possible but remains to be proven whether the spiritual dynamic of psychic energy obeys the law of Negentropy." That is whether it can build up a higher gradient. And the colloquial understanding of this is probably best expressed by the words of Yeats in one of his poems. That as one grows older physically one spirit must dance faster. So that we built up spiritual energy as our psychic energy naturally plays itself out. But note that the concept of an negentropy, of a building up of a spiritual energy comes from nuclear physics. And one of the basic insights there, the law of conservation of energy, that because the physical visible manifestation of energy it exhausts itself there must be some aspect to the universe where it is increased. Otherwise the law of the conservation of energy would not hold.
One last quotation from her and then we'll move on to our material. This is quite late in the book. We're talking about the spirit as like an invisible amperage which quite possibly increases its capacity as psychic energy is expanded, made to work and so forth. This happens for individuals. This also happens for mankind as a whole. All human beings forming a pool of shared collective psychic energy at certain very deep depths. And that in the classic understanding of this, which Jung finally comes to accept, that after long long periods of time. Many centuries. Several thousand years. The psychic energy constellated around certain potent images runs down. And they must be reconstituted in a new way in a new expression. And that new expression has to come out of man's spiritual capacity. So that every long duration of human life there is a new age that occurs. And what makes the new age is that the basic energizing images, the archetypal images, re are re-energized. They're re-constellated. It's not that they're made from scratch. It's not that archetypes are not eternal. But the idea is that their expression in terms of constellated images is a factor in the psyche. And that while the archetypes themselves are spiritual, the spirit in no way is a thing. In no way is identifiable with just what we would understand the psyche. But is identifiable with the universe as a whole. Including the psyche. Including the physical universe. Including all of the inscrutable unknowns. And that out of this vast universal pool the archetypal images are reconstilated in cycles in human history.
In ancient classical understanding, East and West, the notion was that there is a great year. In the West the great year was computed by Plato to be about 2160 years. That every 2160 years a complete cycle of human life is going through. And that at the end of that cycle there is a falling away rather rapidly of the energized constellation of images in man's psyche and they must be reconstituted.
Now Jung found in his work that there is a very peculiar watershed visa vie alchemy. That alchemy more than 2,000 years ago was not at all a viable metaphor for individuation processes. No one ever talked about it that way. And this is quite distinct from our understanding now. And Jung understood this also. We've understood this for quite some time. That man's alchemical capacity in terms of metallurgy has been around for a very long time. The first time anywhere in the world that the refinement of an inner self is likened to gold in a crucible is in one of the very last books of the Old Testament. A book sometimes not included in the, in the Old Testament texts called The wisdom of Solomon. And it's a book that was written in Alexandria in Egypt, in Hellenistic Egypt, about 20 B.C. And it's the first time that anybody ever uses the allegorical or metaphorical statement that he who understands wisdom has been tried in the crucible and has been found to be pure as the refined gold.
But in the 2nd and 3rd centuries A.D. this kind of imagery is increasingly in use. And by the 4th century the alchemical parallel between inner development and metallurgical processes is almost a given. It occurs consistently in wisdom literature through the 4th and 5th centuries. And then it disappears from Western civilization. It goes underground. And just as it disappears from Western civilization, it begins to reappear in a new rising cultural civilization of the Arabic world of Islam.
And we've talked somewhat. And if you like Miss Von France's book Alchemical Active Imagination on the origins of alchemy has a few statements in here which would give someone a basic indication. But there are many lacunae in her presentation here. I don't know where she's gone into it in any greater depth. But let me just remind you of the transition point.
The classical transition was outside of Jerusalem in the late 600's. And the alchemical master at that time was an old, an old Christian monk named Marianos. And he initiated a young Islamic Prince Khalid into understanding that the alchemical processes which you do in the lab are analogues for an interior process which occurs within you. And that only in the earliest stages is there a temptation to think that the inner process is mirroring the outer process. So that initially in the initial stages of alchemy the procedure is not to be clear. To accept the confusion. To relish the unknowing about it. So that you do not make an imitation of yourself based on a material process. That if you purposely keep the chaos in the scrambler in operation, there comes a point in the alchemical process where from the inside one begins to understand. One sees with an inner eye. And when one sees with an inner eye the outward processes begin to mirror the inner process. This is the whole spiritual power of alchemy. That the external process in no way is the lead with the inner process being an imitation of that. But rather it's the reverse of that where it's the inner process that takes the lead.
So that later on, a thousand years later, when a classic presentation of the alchemist in his laboratory is presented. And I think I have a slide of this. And perhaps I'll bring it in next week. We see setup in this lab with all the familiar alchemical equipment. The various beakers and the kariatokis(?). And the all of the classical alchemical equipment in the middle of the lab is set up a prayer tent. And the old alchemist is praying, or meditating as we would say. Because that process came through Islamic civilization he's on a little rug. A little prayer rug. And it's in his inner meditation that he's doing the processes which he will then come out of his meditation and go to his equipment and he will know how to make it happen there. The alchemist is not someone who follows nature but someone who is a spiritual artist who transforms nature. The nature of the base metal is to remain the base metal. It doesn't have any interest in becoming anything other than what it is. If the alchemist who transforms that. And the way he stepped the transformation is that he carries out the work inside of himself first.
So that the alchemist is a master of transformation from the inside out. He passes from his capacity, he passes in his spiritual amperage this transforming to the material. So that what is made from the alchemist is really not gold but is that Philosopher's Stone. This is why it's called the Philosopher's Stone. It's made from him. And that Philosopher's Stone then can project its transforming qualities onto other metals. And it's the Philosopher's Stone then that changes other metals into higher metals. In this there's a kind of a spiritual magnetism. That only when the alchemist himself is magnetized can he magnetize his stone. And then his stone magnetize baser metals and make them noble metals. silver or gold. But this magnetizing is a transforming capacity.
Now this use, this powerful use, of metallurgical technique as a spiritual process was unheard of. As I say before about 20 B.C., at the very earliest. We know that this is true not only in Western civilization. Egypt and Sumeria, Assyria, Greece. Wherever metalworking had been brought to a state where they could have technically learned how to project out and make alloys. Make a gold coating or a silver coating on something. Which all the early metallurgical capacity was to coat material. We know also in Chinese alchemy that there was absolutely no use of the spiritual analog until about 300-400 A.D. And that the Chinese analog comes from the West. So that the birth of alchemy as a spiritual science. Perhaps we should say as a spiritual art which translates into an arcane science. is made in the West. And it is made specifically in Alexandria.
Von France and her material does not go into it in this depth. She writes that it was a cross between Greece and Egypt. And she talks about the original alchemy as if it were Greek. And she says, "in Greece it was a switch from a religious mythological outlook on the existence of the world to for the first time a philosophical one. In the sense that the basic concepts were philosophical but filled with mythological mana, so to speak. One of the ideas namely that the basic elements of the universe are mathematical forms was created through the pythagoreans and carried on by Plato. And it's of very great importance. On the other hand in Egypt techniques have been highly developed but, and this is very relevant, these chemical techniques were used mostly in a specific realm of Egyptian religious life. If you go to Egypt look at the remains of Egyptian religious art you will be struck by the fact that practically everything consists of religious representations which are connected with life after death." And she goes on and says that alchemy comes out of the meeting of Greece and Egypt. But that meeting does not happen in Athens or Corinth. It happens in only one place and that's in Alexandria.
The Egyptian understanding of religious processes, we have talked about. Is the basic structure of the Hermetic tradition. And the working core of that structure is that there is a sacred language which controls the joints, the movable juxtapositions, of stages in the articulate process of life and death. And that this magical language learned in life can be used after life. And that it can be used to the extent that one can come back to life from the afterlife. One can be reborn. so that in this kind of a religious process there are two archetypal figures in Egyptian representation. that finally through the long centuries it's sifted down to this. That in the day the major god image was Ra, the Sun God, Helios. And so he became the major focus, the major archetypal presentation of divinity in life. And the counterpart to that, the compliment to that became Osiris. Who became the major archetypal figure of the afterlife or the netherworld or the underworld. And the basic quality of Osiris is that he can be dismembered and brought back together. He is brought back together by Isis, the life force. Spiritual life force. So that Osiris can become fragmented and reformed. Which is distinct from Ray who is never more nor less than what he is. That the Sun is is the unchanging unity. So that in life the archetype is unchanging unity but in afterlife it's the transformational deity who can be taken apart and put back together.
Now in, in the Egyptian mythological understanding, Osiris was dismembered into 14 parts. And then of course the parts are brought back together. So you have fourteen parts taken into fragmentation and fourteen parts joined back together. And if you allow a day for each of these you see you have a 28 day moon cycle. So that you have Isis as the goddess of life, who is like a lunar power who complements the Sun. Not just in the sense that she returns the light of the Sun back. But that her function is just as essential as the sun's function. She is in no way inferior. But instead of having her relationship with Ra, Isis and Ra, it's Isis and Osiris always. And that relationship always produces the child. The divine child Horus. That is to say though the life energy and the afterlife King, if we can say. Ra is like the king of life and Osiris is like the king of the Dead. And the Egyptian Book of the Dead is the, is the whole complex litany especially in the Theban recension from the 18th dynasty of just how this happens. Just how was Cyrus and Isis recollect all of the fragmented energies and transform it and bring life back.
There were 14 parts to Osiris. And there were 14 regions in Egypt where the parts of Osiris were buried. That is to say the whole landscape of Egypt then became a mythological cemetery. Not a cemetery just to commemorate the dead part in the various places but these dead parts are collected again. So that Isis in her resurrecting Osiris journeys around these ceremonial points in Egypt and recollects him. And the recollecting of him is just in time for the Nile floods to come and inundaate the land. And then he's dismembered and, and then the dry season and then she recollects it. So that there's a whole movement there of the mythological ecology of meaning.
The sight out of all these sites where the mind of Osiris was taken down into the netherworld was a place called Tap Osiris. Tap Osiris was located about 20 miles east of Alexandria in between the Mediterranean Sea and Lake Mariotas. And it was near that ancient Egyptian site ancient by it was there at least by 3000 B.C. And near that site was a meditative ascetic community about 2,000 years ago. Described by an ancient Alexandrian writer named Philo of Alexandria. And he said of this community that it was a long-standing group of ascetic men and women. And he called them therapeuti. And he said of them that they were healers. That they not only healed the body but they also could heal the soul. And that they founded their monastery hundreds of years before his time at this particular site because it was symbolic of reminding those who were there that they were no longer in the old mythological psychic cycle of Isis and Osiris. But that they were transforming their function into a new expression and it was there at that community that I believe that. And I've been lecturing on this on Tuesday nights for some time. That Jesus mind is a teenager and stayed there for about 28 years meditating, studying, learning how to do this and finally mastering the whole process.
It's only after that, that you begin to get the old Egyptian alchemical Hermetic tradition applied to individuals instead of just the Pharaohs. If you look at the old Egyptian mythological representations, the transformations happen yes. But they happen only for the aristocracy. And the really powerful languages, the spells, the really powerful languages are really for the king, the Pharaoh. So that in the B.C. centuries the symbol of the self in human beings was quite naturally the king. And you can find in any culture you want to look at that this is so. You can go to China or you can go to India. You can go to ancient Britain. You can go to Egypt, Greece wherever you go. The symbol of the self is the king. But in the first century A.D. you find a radical transformation of that. That the synthesizing symbol of the self becomes instead of the king becomes the individual, the person. And instead of being just for the royal personage is now for any man or woman who has the wisdom to follow that process. The spiritual tenacity to not give up. So that you have a radical refashioning of the royal art. the royal way. Which is then presented to any man or woman who will follow this way. It is a way of life.
And alchemy becomes the great testing point in this. The testing in alchemy is not the metallurgical principle of cupellation to see whether you have real gold or not. But the testing is for the person to see can you do this. You're not out to make gold. That would just be pure clever avarice. But you're out to test whether you yourself have done this. Whether you have transformed yourself. And one of the proofs of that was that you could transform other things. You could transform water into wine. You could transform base metals into noble metals. Because the material world has to follow, as Jung calls it, there are certain gradients in energy. And just like in physical energy and in psychic energy the same laws, the same principles and so forth. and the physical laws cannot be abrogated. And the psychic laws cannot be abrogated. And the physical and psychic laws are the same.
But the Spirit is not captured by the physical. It's not captured by the psyche. The spirit is free. The spirit is an invisible amperage which is below and behind any manifestation, psychic or physical. So that one begins then to be able to talk about the psychophysical, one word, the psychophysical world. And that the psychophysical world is transform about by the spirit. By the action of the spirit. So that one has then a very real way to see if you have worked this process in yourself. And in fact the very classic by now description of this is "the work". And some of you may have heard this phrase. And many teachers have used it. Gurdjieff and so forth. What is the work? The work is that there is an effective reality to what you do.
And Jung often writes...and when we get into it today The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche, in his opening essay there. Which is called On Psychic Energy. One of the distinguishing qualities of transformation is that it is able to produce work. That something actually happens. And that usually in the psyche what happens is a round of effects but nothing different is done. Whereas in a very powerful way, when the capacity for self transformation comes into play, one is able to change and reform.
Jung writes here in The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche. This is volume 8 in The Collected Works. And i I probably should remind you here again. Some of you are are new and some of you probably haven't understood this yet. Jung's Collected Works are 20 volumes. The last two are bibliographies and indexes. There's no way to read Jung with The Collected Works. They're not self teaching at all. And they're put together in a rather hodgepodge way. So that if you go too Jung in terms of The Collected Works you have to know ahead of time what you're going to read and what you're going to not read. You have to be very selective. And what I've been trying to show you here over the last five, six, seven weeks is how to understand that The Collected Works are like a very complete but very dumb computer program. You have to go in and you have to quarry out exactly what you want and ignore the rest of it. So you have to go, if you don't have enough experience on your own to to pick and choose from your own experience. And after you've dealt with yourself long enough to you, you will see that you simply know when, when this is what you need to read and when something else isn't. Your inner self calls out to you this is what do you need. It's just like thee it's just like the body when it needs potassium you find yourself selecting bananas in the fruit market. And you never even think about it. it's like that. When you really need something for your health it makes itself apparent. You're here at lectures like this because something in you has matured to the point where you realize that it can be talked about. And that it very often is necessary to go and hear someone else. Even if you could think it for yourself. Even if you could experience it for yourself. There is a point of maturity and going to hear somebody else say it. just to have them say it. And that's very, very necessary.
So The Collected Works of Jung are extremely difficult to use. It's best to use the books of Jung translated and published before The Collected Works. And if any of you get interested you can check the because the previous cassettes. And we've gone through and I've indicated from the beginning, from the beginning of Jung's work. I will give you two books now which you can check which were very formative for Jung. One is a book written by the great American psychologist William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience. Written about and published about 1902. And it influenced Jung all of his life. If it, get it to Jung because James was very, very fine man. Very he was as famous in 1902 as Jung as in 1987. And James indicated to Jung conclusively that there are areas of the psyche which are not amenable to immediate conscious inspection. James for instance in The Varieties of Religious Experience alludes to experiments which he undertook to confirm or disprove the contention that a friend of his, a man named F.W.H. Myers. Who came up with the idea that there was a subliminal consciousness. This was about 1886. And James throughout his experiments and so forth discovered that in fact there is in anybody you pick a subliminal consciousness. And you can prove it to yourself. In two or three nights you can set yourself to wake up at any time you want to wake up in the morning. You can make an inner alarm clock out of your subliminal subconscious. It's just one little simple indication to show yourself you can wake up exactly at any minute that you choose. One minute to six.
In The Varieties of Religious Experience James extended this and said that because there is no way to tell how deep the subliminal unconscious goes as far as we know this capacity of man is infinite. And later on, who is it that use this phrase. I think, I think that Schiller used this phrase once. He said that man's spirit is an empty infinity. Not to be confused with an infinite emptiness. That was in the On the Aesthetic Education of Man by Schiller who was a friend of Gorthe(sp?). In fact Jung alludes to Schiller quite a bit in his early work.
Aside from William James there a book called From India to the Planet Mars by Theodore Flournoy. And it's a case study of a person who had a deep psychic experience and was convinced that they had gone from India to the planet Mars. And Flournoy just presents the, the case, the material for the reader to decide for themselves. And it's been a metaphysical classic and many people have dismissed it and so forth. But Jung took it on this kind of a basis. That there are such things as psychic facts. and because it was true for this person that it was psychically true. And that the psychologist in his view must then investigate this. And find out the meaning of it. That is not meaningless. And in fact he found a great deal more in that volume.
In Psychic Energy...and we'll take a break in just a minute. In Psychic Energy Jung shows that there are two completely dissimilar ways of looking at psychic energy. And there are **inaudible word** to all of us. one is the mechanical causal and the other is instead of causal final. And instead of mechanical that it is a a-causal relationality. Later on he would call it synchronicity.
In Psychic Energy.. and some of you that have been here since the first lecture you recognized now why we started out this way. That polarity that Jung uses in The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche is a Parmenidean polarity. That is both elements are mutually exclusive. The old idea of Parmenides, what is is and what isn't isn't. And there's, and there's no way that they contact each other. Aside from this is a Heraquitian polarity which is that the two elements in the polarity always worked together.
Please turn your cassette now and we'll commence playing on the other side after a brief pause.
END OF SIDE 1
...no way that they contact each other. Aside from this is a hericlitian polarity which is that the two elements in the polarity always work together. Like the Tai Chi is a perfect symbol an example of a hericlitian. Heraclitus used the, the image of fire. Can you tell where fire ends and the air begins. The flame in the air they're always interpenetrating, interchanging. Or sometimes Heraclitus used the the simile of the stream flowing. So that a polarity in a hericlitian sense is a polarity whose dynamic yields unity. Like the Sun. But a paramedian and polarity is that which naturally does not meet and has to be brought together only in a very precarious way. And as soon as that precariousness is not maintained it will fall apart again. Like Osiris.
The acausal change of relation, that way of looking, he says is analogous to time. Whereas the mechanical causal viewpoint is very analogous to space. And he says of the acausal, of what becomes eventually the synchronistic, that from this viewpoint we must understand that we are abstracted from substance and movement. That movement and substance, a substance which moves, needs to have space in which to occur. But the acausal change of relation needs only time to occur. It does not need space which is why there's no causality. and that psychic energy from an acausal viewpoint is always directive towards a goal. And it really doesn't matter what the sequence is for the goal. As long as all of the elements in the sequence are there the goal will be will be happen. This is very difficult to understand at first. And then it's just so simple you wonder why you can't. It's like all of the elements instead of having to be in a series belong in a matrix. And as soon as that matrix is full in any order whatsoever the goal is there. The pelliants(?) are like an ensemble trigger and as soon as they're all collected together in any, in any order without there being any space just some time element then the goal is achieved whereas in causality there needs to be a definite sequence. there has to be A,B,C,D. And Jung uses this example, he says that in an acausal situation it's irrelevant what A, B and C are. And whether they happen. They could be x y z, it doesn't make any difference whatsoever.
But the goal directive at acausally is always key to transformation. So that there is no way that transformation ever happens in a causal mode. Transformation is a function of wholeness and not a function of step by step building it up. Which is why a human being even if they mastered all of the detailed steps. Even if you could program all the various alchemical steps that there are and correlate them and get the basic prototype of what they statistically would be, you would have nothing. it would be fictive. And it would be ineffective from what I introduced you earlier tonight. because the transformation comes from you and not from the process itself in the first place.
So that Jung then in writing on psychic energy says that this is synchronicity is a final as opposed to a causal process. Final in that what is really operatively real for it is that it comes to a goal. That is to say transformation occurs because there is a goal. Transformation does not occur in like an open ending progression. It doesn't occur because things want to just change. it isn't constant change that makes transformation. Transformation is very specific. It happens when there's a change because there is a goal that was not there before. Therefore the transformation. Nature transforms because the goal has to changed.
In a very massive way Jung came to understand that the self symbols of man had a different goal in all of a sudden in the A.D. centuries. We and...it was irregardless of cultural background. Of religious leaning and background. It happened for Romans. It happens for Persians. It happen for people in India, whether Hindu or Buddhist. It happened it seemed across the whole board that there was a different operative symbol for the self goal. And therefore all the processes which had classically been there for attaining the self had to transform. And you find across the board in the first and second centuries A.D. that all of the religious systems wherever they are, all the religious beliefs transform.
Now we'll take a break.
You know I can never give the lecture I prepare. I think I mentioned this. I always prepare a very beautiful academically sound lecture and then I never quite get to it. So today I was, I was reading some of the Nietzsche's Zarathustra but the Superman of the ubermensch. And as I was trying to memorize some of they saying so I could quote them pretty accurately. My neighbor who is typical fearful modern man whose walled himself in and has huge doberman dogs and so forth. And just I'm trying to remember the German word ubermensch I hear these vicious dogs next door. I'll take this guy get those imaginary fellows. and I thought well it isn't the ubermensch but the dobermans. That's modern man. Hooray for our fearfulness. You'll never get us.
What's peculiar and in Nietzsche and I, I have an acquaintance of course with a lot of this material. But I don't, I don't have the kind of background that someone like Dr. Heller would have. He grew up with German language being spoken in the home and in that culture. And I've been trying to get Dr. Heller for years to give a course on Jung's intellectual background. Because so many of us can read Goethe or Nietzsche and Schopenhauer but we don't read it in the same way that Jung did. But someone like Dr. Heller can read it in that way. and there's in Nietzsche for German-speaking people of that time of that generation, there was something neracular(?) about Nietzsche. Just an incredible kind of a charisma about his material. And Thus Spoke Zarathustra when it came out was like a revelation to the German speaking mind of Europe. And Jung gave five years of lectures, lectured once a week for five years on Zarathustra. So it was very formative.
What doesn't occur to us very often. And if we remember we usually remember it incorrectly that in Zarathustra, the Superman, the ubermensch, is not associated with the celestial elements. He's associated with the earth. It's very peculiar. And if you ask most people who have even read this how they remember it, they remember the Superman that being like cosmic force. Not at all. Not at all. and he writes in...Nietzsche writes, "I teach you the Superman. Man is something that should be overcome. What have you done to overcome him? All creatures hitherto have created something beyond themselves. and do you want to be the ebb of this great tide and return to the animals rather than overcome man? What is the ape to men? A laughing stock or a painful embarrassment. And just so shall man be to the Superman. A laughing stock or a painful embarrassment. You've made your way from worm to man and much in you is still worm. once you were Apes and even now man is more of an ape than any ape. But he who is wisest among you he also is only a discordant and hybrid of planet and of ghost. Behold I teach you the Superman. The Superman is the meaning of the earth. Let your will say the Superman shall be the meaning of the earth. I entreat you my brother's remain true to the earth. And do not believe those who speak to you of super terrestrial hopes. They are poisoners whether they know it or not. They are despisers of life. Atrophy and self poisoned men of whom the earth is weary. So let them be gone."
Very often we have this, we have this uncanny sense in our intuition that somehow the best of man, the spirit in man, is beyond the earth. Or above the earth. Or transcends the earth. This is the archetype of the self. Nietzsche is going against the grain of the classic Western archetype of the self. Because his vision is a vision of something yet to come. And the only way that he could express it a hundred years ago was to, to try and negate what was there. and that I think the phrase that he used was trans evaluate all values. change them all. Whatever gives turn them upside down and so forth.
Our archetypal self is like a star. It is very curious. and in a very sophisticated alchemy in the late 17th century. Because chemical techniques had become very great by that time. By the time of Sir Isaac Newton. Even though they're primitive to us now in comparison to what was there say in the 13th century. Or the 3rd century. Newton's understanding of physics and chemistry very much almost contemporary of ours. His alchemy produced in using the element antinomy, produced a star. So that the the Philosopher's Stone came out in a very interesting shape. And I have in this book called The Foundations of Newton's Alchemy published by Cambridge University Press. The author is a woman incidentally. The star regulus of Antony. It's called Regulus because in the constellation of Leo, the Lion, the brightest star is regulus. And this is the photograph of the archetypal image of the self that for 2,000 years has been in at least Western man. It's very peculiar that this should be there. In the B.C. centuries the star was never internalized. it was always external. The notion of a guiding star is external. But a guiding star for us is very much an internal vision. And those who were sensitive to this. And I imagine all of you are you wouldn't be here. This would be meaningless to you unless you had some sensitivity to this. Those internal images are not imitations of the outside as we've been saying. it isn't like you close your eyes and the post retinal images then blink and you have an image. It isn't that at all. those images come from inside. They come up from some oceanic vastness within us. Which is capable of presenting very powerful images. Which have feeling with them.
And part of the process of discovery of Jung's work is that there are many stars. That the interior realm of every human being has a whole constellation of stars. And out of that multitude, I guess is the word to use. out of that multitude one of them becomes special to us and presents itself as our self. it's like that.
As I say I had a lecture all revved up so that you could see the development of this. But I'm going to have to because of time skip over and go right to it.
In The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche on page 190, in the section known as On The Nature of the psyche. Section six, The Unconscious as a Multiple Consciousness. Jung writes, "The hypothesis of multiple luminosities rests partly, as we have seen, on the quasi conscious state of unconscious contents. And partly on the incidence of certain images which must be regarded as symbolical. These are to be found in the dreams and visual fantasies of modern individuals. and can also be traced in historical records."
You might be interested to know that the very first time that what he's about to talk about was presented. The very first time in discursive writing was about 500 A.D. by Dionysius the Areopagite. where in his celestial hierarchies he talks about how in the amplitudes of the inner darkness there are whirling light figures. And he goes on to describe them and so forth. And I once a long time ago in San Francisco in the 60's read that passage in English translation. And was showing projected images of galactic structures in photographs from astronomical slides. And the descriptive words and the images correlated. And the students who were listening had no idea that had been written 500 A.D. They thought it was a description by a contemporary astronomer who had religious leanings. The point being is that the inner realm, the visioning of the inner realm is extremely accurate. Extremely. That is to say we know now that the physical universe in its constitution and its continuum is extremely specific. That for instance light, has light in the electromagnetic spectrum that if you change the frequency of light just a little bit you get a totally different color. You can move from orange to blue in visual light by just changing a few hundredths of an angstrom. That it's like fine-tuning on a very sophisticated radio. That exactly at such-and-such a number, point six or whatever, there's that channel. So that the physical universe exists as a very specific occurrence. There's nothing ambiguous about it at all. and it's cueing into the specificity, internally that confers the feeling of veracity. That veracity psychologically is not at all the same thing as logical soundness. Or provability in terms of thought. And Jung in fact makes a great deal out of this as saying you cannot explain to someone they're wholeness. You can use very great language and be masterful about it. And be trusted by them and they can understand every bit of it. And it will not make any difference in their life. But if they just have a fleeting vision of their true wholeness, the sense of the veracity of that will never leave them. It's indelible. They will go to any lengths to to just to recover that. Or discover how to get back to that. Or how to attain that again.
It's like that inner sense of veracity once the quality of, what he will refer to here, in alchemy it's called the lumen naturai. The natural light. That is to say the natural light of your real self. Once you have seen by that light then you know what veracity is. Then you're certain. Then you can from that standpoint understand the specific calibration of the psychic and the material world. That they have ambiguities in virtue of their polarity but they're not ambiguous in terms of their identification.
So he's going to write here and he does write, let's read it. "So the dreams and modern fantasies and also having historical records, there are certain images. and as the reader may be aware one of the most important sources for symbolical ideas in the past is alchemy. from this I take first and foremost the idea of the scintillae." S-c-i-n-t-i-l-l-a-e. Which means sparks, sparks. Sparks of light. "Scintillae which appear as visual illusions in the arcane substance." This is alchemical talk and he is bringing this in from classic alchemy. In the arcane substance one can see these scintillae.
"Thus the aurora consurgens," this alchemical book attributed to Thomas Aquinas. "Thus the aurora consurgens part two says no that the foul earth quickly receives white sparks. These sparks Coonrod explains as the radii at gray scintillae. The anima católica. The world soul which is identical with the spirit of God." Jung writes, "From this interpretation it is quite clear that certain of the alchemists had already divined the psychic nature of these luminosities." By psychic he's talking about unconscious here. "They were seeds of light broadcast in the chaos." And must say here that it isn't that they're static. Scintillae are never static but the inner vision of them is always dynamic. Always, if you can imagine a dark night with no moon and all of a sudden somebody throwing like confetti a bunch of fire flies. Hundreds of them. It, it's like that I'm always, always dynamic. And not so much in a physical motion but in like a vibrating motion. If one could see clearly at that incident one would see if they rotate. Because they they have that function of rotation. Why is this so? Because rotation creates time whereas radiation creates space. It's different.
"From this interpretation is clear that certain of the alchemists had already divined the psychic nature of these luminosities. These were seeds of light broadcast in the chaos." Which and he mentions Khunrath, Heinrich Khunrath. Around 1600 was a great Alchemist. his great book is called The Amphitheatre of True Wisdom. We have a copy in the vault downstairs.
"These are seed plots of worlds to come. These are seeds out of which whole worlds can come. One such spark is the human mind." Now Jung is shifting very radically here. And without some of our background here we wouldn't be able to follow this. We thought that he's talking about deep numinous imagery from the unconscious. And all of a sudden it sounds like he's saying that the human mind is like one of these sparks in the unconscious. And that's what he's saying. But that is not the human mind in its small sense but in its radically complete sense. The human mind is, is of this nature. "The arcane substance, the watery earth or the earthy water." That is to say that there's a, there's a mixture here. Mud. "Of the world distance is universally animated by the fiery spark of the soul of the world" Notice know that he's talking about mind and soul in parallels now. Why is he talking about in parallels? Because he's holding up a Parmenidean polarity between mind and soul. But he's juxtaposing them so that they occur together. Even though they're, even though they're different. They can be brought together and Jung is doing that here.
Then he quotes strangely enough that book I had mentioned earlier The Wisdom of Solomon. Which means that you should probably go and get a copy of that book. "In accordance with The Wisdom of Solomon," It's chapter 1 verse 7. Jung quotes it "For the Spirit of the Lord filleth the world." In The Wisdom of Solomon they're talking about wisdom, about Sophia. How wisdom is a hope and like a holy feminine. A holy woman. And wisdom will only come to a person who has an orderly mind. I think they used the term clean. Because she's fastidious and she'll only make her home in he who has literally cleaned up his act. "For the Spirit of the Lord filleth the world."
Jung writes, "in the water of the art, in our water which is also the chaos. there are to be found the fiery sparks of the soul of the world as pure essential forms. These formi, these forms, correspond to the Platonic ideas from which one could equate the sparks, the scintillae, with the archetypes and the assumption that the forms are stored up in a super celestial place. They are a philosophic version. One would have to conclude from these alchemical visions that the archetypes have about them a certain effulgence or quasi consciousness. And that numinosity entails luminonsity.
Paracelsus seems to have had an inkling of this. The following is taken from his Philosophia Sagax, "And as little as aught can exist in men without the divine neuman. So little can aught exist in man without the natural lumen. A man is made perfect by Neuman and lumen and these two alone. Everything Springs from these two. And these two are in man, but without them man is nothing. Though they can be without man." And then he goes on to write some more about the lumen naturai. And that the sparks come from the Spirit of God. And this Alchemist Khunrath writes that among the scintilla he distinguishes is a a perfect single potential form which is the elixir. And hence the arcane substance itself. If we may compare the sparks to the archetypes, it is evident that Khunrath lays particular stress and one of them. This one, capitalized, is also described as the monad and the sun. And they both indicate the deity. The similar image is from a letter of Ignatius of Antioch to the Ephesians about the 1st century A.D. and where he writes about the coming of Christ. "How then was he manifested to the world, a star shone in heaven beyond the stars. And it's light was unspeakable. And its newness caused astonishment and all the other stars with the Sun and Moon gathered in coarse round this star."
Jung writes, "Psychologically the one scintillae or monad is to be regarded as a symbol of the self." And of course you can see how compact Jung's writing is in here. What he's indicating, a very curious situation. It seems to be universally normal in modern men and women, or in those men and women whose record we have in historical times back to about the 1st century A.D., for a vision of the inner self to have this spark. this star. This scintillae quality. and that that quality to be, to have a sense of veracity as of the inner certainty as such that this is one's true self. And that the character of that veracity is understandable as if the clear mind to see. But we do not have any indication in the B.C. centuries in the text. No one talks this way at all. Not sages or philosophers or anybody. Instead the symbols which they use, the metaphors which they use in proliferation and across the board all indicate that the sense of the self was the royal personage. generally the king. Occasionally the queen. But especially the king. So that the ultimate self image for instance of the, of the Greeks would be Zeus, the king of gods.
In Marie-Louise von France's book on Jung, she writes this. "While myths and fairy tales tell of a hero who supersedes the old king. The mythology of the transformation of the old King into his young successor was more characteristic of Egyptian theology. From which it entered the early alchemical speculations where this image became the most essential theme." That is to say there is a archetypal scenario which enters in and occurs. And occurs especially about the time of the 1st century A.D. That the old mythology of the King as the self symbol is transformed. the archetype of the self and the collective unconscious is transformed. Instead of the King, the hero. That is to say the individual. The person who manages this. And is heroic by virtue of having managed this.
This aspect in fact is extraordinary. Because the motif of the young man who comes to kill the old king in the sacred wood by the sacred lake is exactly the mythological theme that sir James George Frazer stumbled upon. And in trying to answer why this was so important wrote that huge set of books called The Golden Vow. And that whole 13 volumes of the Golden Vow is all an attempt by Frazer to try and explain to himself and to anybody else who would read this why is this so damned important. that that, that image which had never been very important. And on the surface of it, it's just one of any number of themes. And in antiquity, in earlier antiquity, it was negligible. One could go to Prometheus. One could go to any number of mythological scenarios. And yet this one sticks in the craw. And the first time that it begins to be really important is around the time of Virgil. When the Roman psyche was undergoing a vast transformation. And that this priest of dana around Mimi in Italy. She in the sacred wood serves a sacred king. Who in his capacity integrates a mythologically recharged kingdom. and part of that cycle is that his time runs out. The energy which he commands, which he integrates, vast thought was runs out. And a new young man must come in and kill the old king. He must kill the old king. The king must not be spared. That a part of the spiritual mystery, and this is what got Frazer with his Victorian background. Why does the King have to be murdered? Not just killed but murdered. Massacred. It's an alchemical image. It's the first time that it appears. It's like those in those dreams of Zosimos. The priest has to be dismembered in the cauldron.
That the transformation is a reforming of the very structure of this element. It's a reformation of the very structure of oneself. There's going to be nothing left of the old self. That is to say even though the structure is changed, the qualities that were in the old self reappear in a new structure. And so they function differently.
Jung goes on to make a great deal in the structure and dynamics of the self about how the, the, the elements, the tone, the star which were characteristic of oneself before may still linger on. but that they function differently. They're in a different form. a different structure. And it isn't just learning some new way of being. It isn't changing your interest. It goes deeper than that. It's like the very structure of onesself is changed. And those qualities which were there are now in a wholly different relationship. And the functioning is in a different way.
Jung writes about this inner light, "The lumen naturai which illuminates consciousness and the scintillae are germinal luminosity shining forth from the darkness of the unconscious." And his famous a favorite Alchemist Gerard Dorn says, "Thus little by little he will come to see with his mental eyes a number of sparks shining day by day. And more and more and growing in such a great light that thereafter all things needful to him will be known. Or will be made known." That is to say the inner capacity to see acclimates itself. So that the inner light begins to conflate itself out of these seeds. What seem to be insignificant. What seemed to be just sparks in the darkness. Increasingly begin to generate together an inner light. And the reason why it's called the lumen Naturi is that it comes from within as if it were like and interior Sun, finally. It in no way is an imitation of an exterior. And in no way is just a mirror of some exterior process. It isn't a memory of an external light by which then you can see inside.
In the Vajrayana in Tibetan Buddhism is called clear light. To distinguish it from from any kind of visible light. Clear like in transparent. A transparent light. This may be a little hard to follow give you an example. Recently they about 20 years ago when D.T. Suzuki, the great Japanese Jet Zen master, passed on at the age of 97. He left out a written testimony about his enlightenment when he was about 21 years old. And it was a do-or-die situation. And he had made up his mind that if at the end of a certain period of effort that he wasn't able to have an enlightenment experience that he would kill himself. He made this pact with himself. And he got right down to the very last hour of the last day and he knew that this was it. And then he had this experience. And he said of himself that when it came out of the zendo he was shocked to find that all the trees were transparent. And that looking down that he was transparent too. It's like that that way of seeing. There was no obstruction whatsoever. Is that like that clear light. that lumen naturi is like that. One can see. What do you see? One sees the veracity.
So that the self is that center of your person which comes to be in that realm. So that the ego, the egotistical self, which seems so certain, so familiar, now seems very relative. Very small. Very provincial and parochial. Not at all able to really function in in any grand or elegant way. Okay for linking up to certain tracers if you've got some work to do. But no place to center your spiritual capacity. But that the interior self which comes into being then that's a place where the spirit is at home. That's where Sofia can live. And she makes her home there. And her making her home there. Jung calls Sophia in this archetypal form when the self begins to see her, says it her that this is the anima. This is the soul. Wisdom becomes the, the soul. And uses that term anima. So that the archetype of the the seeing of the archetype of the anima is like a harbinger that the self is beginning to orient itself in the inner constellation of universal possibilities. That is an indication. When one's soul symbol begins to function in dreams. Or in active imagination. Or in your daily life. And you and you start to notice. This aspect that is like indication. That the natural blind, the lumen naturi is beginning to function enough so that the self is coming into constellation and that the anima is becoming visible.
I guess we're just about out of time and I have a lot more to go through. and I guess I'll just bring it back next week.
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