1. Theosophy and Modern Psychology* Dr. Alvin B. Kuhn Published in The Canadian Theosophist Vol. XL, No. 1 Toronto, March-April, 1959, No. 2 Toronto, May-June, 1959 Figure 1 Dr. Alvin Boyd Kuhn (1880-1963), 1931 * Edited by Juan Schoch (http://tekgnosis.typepad.com) for educational research purposes. Re-edited by Jan van Puffelen, puffelej@tiscali.nl

2. When in a field of human interest and a science as important as that of psychology an epochal contribution has been made by an out- standing figure, it is of vital concern to Theosophy to scrutinize the development so as to determine what relation it may bear to The- osophy. Figure 2 Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961), in the forties Such a significant movement confronts us in the great contribution of the eminent and now-aging* psychologist, Dr. Carl Gustav Jung, rated widely as the most profound investigator of psychic science in the special department known today as psychoanalysis. There is a supposition of some general prevalence that Jung has swung psy- chology fairly closely over toward Theosophy and even some idea that he has endorsed Theosophy. It is true that in an earlier work, Modern Man in Search of a Soul, he has written appreciatively of Theosophys approach to the problems of psychism. Much of his writing seems to indicate a commitment to fundamental Theosophical principles, underlying the occult consti- tution of man. In a survey that can not be either thorough or com- prehensive it will be of interest to determine how closely his psy- choanalytic science falls in line with the principles of occult psychol- * The year 1959 when this essay was published was two years before his death. C.G. Jung was then 84 years old. 3. ogy. As a Theosophist sees it; the tremendous problem which modern academic psychology faces is to arrive at an understanding of psy- chic forces, their operation and rationale, without the basic technical knowledge of the mechanics of the psyche and its modes of con- sciousness which Theosophy has the enormous advantage of pos- sessing. The current psychology knows nothing about the 'occult' constitu- tion of man, in which the organization of matter at several grades of atomic structure gives the psyche the power to function consciously at different levels, as the physical, the vital or pranic, the emotional, mental and spiritual, each implementing its own rate, grade and character of energic expression. A more detailed knowledge of this structural system of our psychic equipment enables the Theosophist to account for psychic phenom- ena upon which the conventional systems of current psychology can only blindly speculate. Yet in spite of this default of the true scientific grounds of psycho- logical competency modern psychology has made a prodigious for- ward stride in its truly epochal discovery of the 'unconscious'. It is, however, still miles away from knowing that what it takes to be the simple subsistence of a realm of unconsciousness underlying our conscious awareness is by no means simple, but instead is a complex of a number of differentiated states or modes of unconscious sub- consciousness, so to say. Just as physical science postulated the atom and believed it had the irreducible simple unit of mass structure, but then discovered some 14 more basic constituent particles to go along with the primary pro- ton and electron, so psychoanalysis has yet to discover the several interrelated sub-elements that enter into the total complex of mans conscious potential. Professional psychology has been the basis of the very apt compari- son of the human consciousness with an iceberg: the perceptible 4. consciousness of our waking state, they say, is the small upper visi- ble section of the iceberg, while submerged out of sight beneath it is the immensely larger body of the unconscious. As a broad analogy the comparison well states the case. But consciousness is the product of a far more intricate and complicated structure of parts and ele- ments than the iceberg. And 'orthodox' psychology lacks the technical knowledge of these sub- and super-conscious states which the occult science stands ready to give it. Still we can feel that general psychology is progress- ing in the right direction taking it ever closer to Theosophy, and not away from it. The growing vogue of 'parapsychology' and 'extrasen- sory perception,' along with the work of mediums and psychics of reputed fame and status, are likely to push general investigation to the point of closer affinity with Theosophy. Lacking the full background of esoteric science, Jung has aimed to rationalize and systematize his analysis of the relation of conscious- ness and the unconscious to each other, on the grounds and in the terms of traditional religionism, when he might have done infinitely better to have used the Theosophical fundamentals. So he deals with such psychic or spiritual entities as the soul, the self, the ego, the psyche, the 'libido,' and a very wraith-like pair he calls the anima (Latin, 'soul,'feminine), and its masculine counterpart, the animus, and of course both God and the gods. The ones that figure most prominently in his scheme of elucidation are the psyche, which he uses as a general covering term for the unit of our ordinary consciousness, the self and the ego. And the way in which he correlates the concept of God with these individual ele- ments of the souls life is very curious and interesting. It all shows that in his study he is mulling around right on the ground of The- osophical spiritual science, and is coming close to Theosophical con- clusions at one point or another. We can gain some pretty clear in- sight into his line of investigation if we consider his analysis of these entities which he has predicated in the life of the psyche, or soul. The scheme of relationship of the self, the ego, the gods and God yields much in the way of fruitful ideas even for esotericists. 5. Having mainly the two kinds of consciousness to use as the ground for all systematic analysis, the conscious and the unconscious, he finds the latter quite handy for the task of explaining the interaction of the several elements, particularly the one both he and we know least about, God, by the simple ruse of allocating them to the uncon- scious. He sets them up as the hidden powers of our unconscious, and says that they influence us, rule us, from there. He even says that India is trying to influence us toward its negative and su- premely subjective philosophies "by the back door of the uncon- scious. It is inevitable, then, that in this nameless and nebulous region from which destiny-shaping influences well up to dominate us, he locates 'God'. If this term is not used, in the common anthropomorphic sense as we see is ignorantly employed by religionists, but in the general sense of the ultimate determinative power in our lives and the world, it is indeed intriguing to see how Jung conceives the idea of deity. It might be said that he makes God and the unconscious syn- onymous. At any rate he locates God in the unconscious. At once it is seen as a most significant thing that by so doing he brings God from outside man, somewhere at the summit of the uni- verse, right into the area and constitution of man. Thus he makes God the immanent, not the externalized transcendental deity in rela- tion to man.* It is to be noted that he does not absolutely negate the transcendence of God. But the transcendence here is that of value and character, not of position; not beyond man, but a higher element potential in man. He simply infers that God is a power ensconced in mans unconscious, a power that is higher than the power man con- sciously wields. If we could enter consciously into our great uncon- scious, we would find God there. But he conceals himself from us by keeping himself invisible and beyond the reach and range of our * The internal, immanent god as opposed to the external, anthropomorphic, tran- scendental god of the theists is one of the basic ideas of Gnosticism. 6. conscious experience. Figure 3 The poet and journalist Sir Edwin Arnold, M.A., K.C.I.E., C.S.I. (1832- 1904) translated the Bhagavad Gita from Sanskrit to English for the first time as part of his work The Song Celestial, 1885 As God must be conceived as the ultimate self-generating, self- moving power in our life, Jung characterizes him as 'autonomous', a law unto himself. And he therefore speaks of God as the 'autono- mous content' of our unconscious. This would be closely equivalent to what Edwin Arnold described as: the power within us, not ourselves, that makes for righteousness. Jung, however, would qualify this by asserting that it is ourselves, or at least an integral portion of ourselves, indeed the most essential portion of ourselves, since he designates it as the very 'self' of man, in distinction from the minor term ego, the open human unit of con- sciousness and being. The human ego, he asserts, is an individual- ized fragment of the higher and more inclusive self, or at least lives its life within the latters wider and deeper scope. In passing it is most interesting to note that Jungs allocation of deity to man in the entity he calls the self should go far to conciliate the 7. eternal controversy between the theistic and the humanistic systems, admonishing the theists that divinity is indeed an integral portion of the human endowment, but also challenging the humanists to rec- ognize that this segment of the human nature is not basically hu- man, but divine. And if Jung has correctly characterized these two grades of con- sciousness and their relationship, both theist and humanistas well as the rest of usmust face what appears to be the obvious infer- ence from the situation, which is the somewhat surprising conclu- sion that the God power is indeed an integral portion and element of our human nature, buton Jungs premisesburied deep in the unconscious. As to the position of occultism on the matter, it has to be said that Jungs theorization approximates it quite closely, speaking broadly, for surely the occult science identifies the deepmost soul of man with the God, nature, and it is latent until awakened. A skeptic or scoffer at religious predications of the sort might scur- rilously ask us what is the good of our harboring a god in our un- conscious self. The all-sufficient answer to this question would be: if you know he is there and will pay attention to him, you will become conscious of him and he will bless you in every way. We can let Jung state the case in his own way: The conception of God as an autonomous psychic content makes God into a moral problem, and that, admittedly, is very uncomfortable. But if this problem does not exist, God is not real, for nowhere can he touch our lives. He is then either an historical and intellectual bogey or a phi- losophical sentimentality. (Two Essays on Analytical Psychology, p. 237) The reflection that if we introduce God into our own lives as closely as in our very unconscious selves the relation generates an uncom- fortable moral problem needs some clarification. It seems to say that if we realize that God is as close to us as that, a submerged portion of our own constitution, we are smitten suddenly with the realiza- tion that, with such an 'honored' guest dwelling in our household of life, it may be incumbent upon us to give him a bit more of our at- tention and regard! 8. Figure 4 Alfred Lord Tennyson (1809-1892), ca 1840 We are reminded here of Tennysons estimate of the nearness of God to us in the aphorism: Closer is he than breathing, nearer than hands and feet. Then Jung draws the tremendously pertinent deduction, that if God is not as close to us as that, he virtually sustains no relation to us at all. He stands too far away from us to mean anything vital to us. Only if God is a factor influencing us directly from deep within us can he touch us efficaciously. Jung has given forthright expression to this most crucial judgment in his earlier work, Modern Man in Search of a Soul. He is rebutting the Christian claim that the effort to imitate Christ will work the redeeming grace of salvation: The Imitatio Christi will forever have this disadvantage: we worship a man as a divine model embodying the perfect meaning of life, and then out of sheer imitation we forget to make real the profound meaning pre- sent in ourselves. If I accept the fact that a god is absolute and beyond all human experience, he leaves me cold. I do not affect him, nor does he af- fect me. But if I know, on the other hand, that God is a mighty power within my own soul, at once I must concern myself with him. 9. These words, the utterance of which in the face of dominant conven- tional Christianity called for some courage, may become crucial for the continued existence of Western Christianity. For the statement spells out in the boldest letters the inescapable inference that by the very sincerity and intensity of the devotees effort to pour out his psychic forces of worship upon a historical man of 2000 years ago he will, to the exact degree of his consecration to this end neglect the living presence of the god power slumbering deeply within his own nature, needing to be awakened and called forth. The psychologist drives home the ineluctable logic of the situation in the assertion that if ones relation to ones God goes no deeper than an effort at outward imitation, it remains superficial and does not engage one deeply enough to stir one to the depths. But if, on the contrary, I know that my God is a power whose release and benefi- cent activity awaits my own mastery of a science deep and complex as life itself, then indeed my religion becomes a matter of infinite concern to me. The future of Western religionthe East is more spe- cifically oriented to that attitudealmost certainly will hinge upon this cardinal recognition. In a more recent work, Psychology and Alchemy, (p. 7) the psycholo- gist expands this theme and gives a sharper thrust to its inexorable logic: I am speaking, therefore, not of the deepest and best understanding of Christianity, but of the superficialities and disastrous misunderstand- ings that are plain for all to see. The demand made by the Imitatio Christithat we should value the ideal and seek to become like it ought logically to have the result of developing and exalting the inner man. In actual fact, however, the ideal has been turned by superficial and formalistically-minded believers into an external object of worship, and it is precisely this veneration for the object that prevents it from reaching down into the depths of the soul and transforming it into a wholeness in keeping with the ideal. Accordinglythe divine mediator stands as an image, while man re- mains fragmentary and untouched in the deepest part of him. Christ can indeed be imitated even to the point of stigmatization [the reproduction of his bleeding wounds on hands and feet] without the imitator coming 10. anywhere near the ideal of its meaning. For it is not a question of an imitation that leaves a man unchanged and makes him into a mere artifact, but of realizing the ideal on ones own accountDeo concedentein ones own individual life ... But with the Western man the value of the Self sinks to zero. Hence the universal depreciation of the soul in the West ... Christian civilization has proved hollow to a terrifying degree: it is all veneer, but the inner man has remained untouched and therefore unchanged. His soul is out of key with his external beliefs; ... Yes, everything is to be found outsidein image and in word, in Church and Biblebut never inside. Inside reign the archaic gods, supreme as of old; that is to say, the inner correspondence with the outer God-image is undeveloped for lack of psychological culture and has therefore got stuck in heathenism. Christian education has done all that is humanly possible, but it has not been enough. Too few people have experienced the divine image as the innermost possession of their own souls. Christ only meets them from without, never from within the soul. Pa- ganism, in a form so blatant that it can no longer be denied, is swamping the world of so-called Christian culture. Since this cancer of heathenismthe lawlessness, juvenile criminal- ity, sensuality and viciousness of all sorts now threatening even per- sonal security in our citiesinvolves us in all its actual perils, and the psychologist traces its cause to Christian theology, it is of vital concern to all of us. We have got to try to have Christianity cure the disastrous canker eating at its heart. This canker springs from the worship of a divine ideal embodied in a human personage of ancient times, when the only healing power able to eradicate it is the ultimate knowledge that man, to exalt and deify himself, must exalt and deify the Christ child still lying asleep in the cradle of his own soul. The indictment of Christianity by the psychologist is sensationally arresting because it charges the religion with fatal weakness at the very point where it claims it is stronger than any other religion on earth. Christianity has based its claim of superiority and unique value on the alleged fact that it alone of world religions offers to mankind the one and only divine Son of God, or God himself mani- 11. fest in human flesh, as certitude of our possible divinity. Jung says that this is good as far as it goesbut it is not enough. There is a whole world of difference between this image-worship and the true psychic reality of Christliness. He grants that it can psy- chologically mean much to a person to try to be like Christ. But, in the finaleand this, dear reader, is the nub of the entire debatethe only efficacy and saving reality of the culture is for one to become and be the Christ himself! For each one of us potentially is the Christ, and any worship that falls short of progressively actualizing the ideal potential in the soul is sheer veneer. Now are ye all sons of God, affirms the revered Scripture. For ye are gods and the sons of the Highest.* The deadly sin and error in any religious system is in turning the direction and focus of divine worship away from the heart of the worshipper toward an ideal image located outside. Ancient occult science affirmed that it was ever the veriest blasphemy for the hu- man to worship a power outside himself. Some most important corollary implications inhere dialectically in Jungs analysis of this fundamental psychological defect in Christi- anity. So far as I am aware, Jung has not pointed out the glaringly obvious further logical deduction from it, that if God has the wish and the aim of rearing all his earthly sons and daughters in the im- age and likeness of his own natureand how could any child fail to manifest a likeness to their Parent!it is an egregious and wholly unnatural presumption that he should have ever been represented as having one only Son, a predication which at one stroke abrogates * Ps. 82:6-8 (Word English Bible, version 16-2-2002): 6 I said, You are gods, All of you are sons of the Most High. 7 Nevertheless you shall die like men, And fall like one of the rulers. 8 Arise, God, judge the earth, For you inherit all of the nations. 12. the possibility of divine sonship to all other humans ever to come on earth. It seems incredible that Christian divines have never realized that in exalting one-only Son of God they rob and make vile all other chil- dren of the Father.* Christianity has loudly vaunted its claim to be the religion that has elevated the 'dignity of human nature.' But what greater indignity can you inflict on the human being than to rob him of his divinity? This is in effect what Jung is courageously telling us. It could be excitingly revolutionary for orthodox religion. * The divine origin (and destination) of man is a very old idea. The Orphics were already familiar with that idea (from an Orphic gold lamella found in Thessaly): , Child of the earth am I and from the starry heaven, but my origin is from heaven [alone]. Christian church father Origen (184-254) also taught the divine origin and destina- tion of mankind. There was no difference between Christ and a human, only Christ was outstanding. Origen also taught reincarnation. Emperor Flavius Petrus Sabbatius Justinianus (483-565), mosaic basilica San Vitale in Ravenna But his ideas were later considered as heretic and eventually declared anathema at the second council of Constantinople in 553 under emperor Justinian, even though this was an illegal council because the pope was not [dared not to be] present. 13. By abstracting the Christ power from all men save the Galilean car- penter and persistently flaunting in the face of man the wretched worm-of-the-dust status of his physical humanity, Christianity had demonstrated most tragically its lack of knowledge of the occult soul science which would have kept this half-truth in proper balance with the other half of it, the potential divinity of his higher self. On his purely physical side man is the lowly worm. But it is that same worm, evolved to biological miracle in the body of man himself that will bear the human in the end up to and through the gate of the holy city of spiritual consciousness and glory, with the hosts of heaven strewing palm branches and singing hosanas. For there is joy in heaven over the return of every son of God who has gained victory on earth. When will Christianity recognize the psychological folly and trag- edy of lugubriously Sunday after Sunday beating down the spirit of its worshippers with the reminder of their lowly status as animals on the bodily side, the while it steals away from them the glorious knowledge that they themselves can wield the Christ power to cleanse the corruption of the flesh and glorify themselves as the Christs they are and are to be? Overwhelming them with the conviction of their natural sinfulness and expressly denying to them any power within themselves to cure it, it sends them out hopelessly bewildered as to how they shall ca- jole Jesusonce living in Galilee but now gone off somewhere, or God in the skiesinto forgiving them of their sins and redeeming them of their despicable unworthiness. And all this in utter disdain of the promise in their own Scriptures: Christ in you, the hope of glory.* * From Paul's letter to the Colossians; Col. 1:26-29 (Word English Bible version 16- 2-2002): 26 the mystery which has been hidden for ages and generations. But now it has been revealed to his saints, 27 to whom God was pleased to make known what are the riches of the glory of this mystery among the Gen- 14. Over the whole of the third and fourth centuries the Christian theo- logians in their bitter councils fought over the question whether the Son, second Person of the Trinity, was of the same substance* as the Father, or only of like substance. It split the Church into the Athanasian and the Arian factions, and the point has never been settled to this day. It might be said that at tiles, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory; 28 whom we proclaim, admonishing every man and teaching every man in all wisdom, that we may present every man perfect in Christ Jesus; 29 for which I also labor, striving according to his working, which works in me mightily. * , homoousios = of the same substance (homoiousios = of like substance; the difference was just one iota! An interesting anecdote: Our Santa Claus, St. Nicholas, bishop of Myra did not agree with Arius and struck him down during the Council of Nicaea in 325! Bishop Nicholas of Myra (Santa Claus) hits bishop Arius during the council of Nicaea: detail of a fresco in the Soumela convent (Turkey) Bishop Nicholas was immediately deposed as bishop by the other bish- ops and thrown in jail. But according to legend, he was visited at night 15. the human individual level it is still the great crucial question that the Church theology is unable to answer. And Jung has thrown it on the screen of modern psychology in sharp focus and outline. Is the human individual of the same nature as the Christ, or is he only able to be like the Christ? And Jung virtually asserts that Christianity is doomed if it can not give the answer on the side of sameness. As long as Christian dog- matism makes a historical Christ the unapproachable paragon of deific perfection, the wings of devout Christian consecration and aspiration are psychologically clipped from the start. The Church prods its people with the spur of the hope of salvation into an enter- prise in their spiritual life which at the same time it assures them they can never successfully consummate! It were the most arrant presumption for the Christian worshipper to think that he could ever be as good as Jesus! The difference between being the same as the Christ or only like him may seem on the surface to be quite inconsequential. It is really a vast abyss. Of course 'likeness' is here a very indefinite term; there can be many degrees of similarity. So the debate is largely gratui- tous. Nevertheless the Church could have taken its sure cue from the statement of the Gospel Jesus that: I and the Father are one. * in his cell by Jesus and Mary who asked him why he was imprisoned. "Out of love for you" was the answer. Jesus and Mary then returned him his bishop's vestments and gave him a Bible to read. When Constantine the Great (who was presiding this council and also opposed to Arius) heard of this "miracle", he released him out of the prison, gave him his position as bishop back and allowed him to join the meeting again. As of today there are very few Christian denominations who do not believe in the Holy Trinity and/or the divine status of Jesus. * John 10:29-30 (World English Bible version 16-2-2002): 29 My Father, who has given them to me, is greater than all. No one is 16. Figure 5 Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) Indian philosophy has built largely upon the thesis that the individ- ual Atman is one in nature with the Brahman of the cosmos. From this great doctrine, which inspired the American Transcendental movement* in New England, Emerson drew his axial philosophy that the divine soul of the human is a fragment of the Oversoul of the universe. Can there be any quibble over the identity in nature of God; and his children? If our souls are seed-sparks of the nature of God, the life and consciousness they unfold in evolution can mani- fest no other being than that of the Father. So it is not cosmic Deity that needs mans exultation and added glo- rification; it is the seed of that same Deity seminally sown in the bodies of Gods children on earth, that stands in sore need of culti- vation for its education and growth. If we are cells in the body of able to snatch them out of my Fathers hand. 30 I and the Father are one. * Transcendentalists believed that society and its institutionsparticularly organ- ized religion and political partiesultimately corrupted the purity of the individ- ual. 17. God, the only way by which we can increase his glory is by increas- ing the light and glory in all the cells. What a miscarriage of evolu- tionary procedure that the homage of millions over many centuries has been poured out lavishly, and one might say slavishly, upon one single figure, who, as the claimed Morning Star of the creation and indeed its Logos, surely already was haloed with enough glory so that he would not have needed the worship of lowly mortals on earth! Viewed thus in its expanded connotations, Jungs delineation of the fatal flaw in the Christian system can be of vital moment in the world today. His conception of God, formulated according to prin- ciples of a scientific methodology, seems to necessitate the transferal of the entire alleged historical basis of its provenance over into the realm of purely subjective events in human consciousness. This is readily seen when we consider, in the light of Jungs findings, that the God pictured in Christian imagination as a great Being seated aloft in the cosmos, dissolves, as it were, into a universal sub- sistent all-pervading essence, force or mind, and the alleged histori- cal Jesus is metamorphosed into a power driving for rulership of our life from deep within our collective unconsciousness. Every time in the last two or three centuries that science has an- nounced a new fact or principle incontestably demonstrated, the incrustations and obsessions of ingrained religious fixations, vener- ated mainly for their antiquity rather than honored for their truth, have had to melt away like winters ice before the sun of spring. Jungs focusing of the sun of true knowledge upon the errant and arrant formulations of ignorant pietism in theology can confidently be expected by the occultist to melt down some more of the hard- ened deposit. Long before Jung came on the scene Theosophy promulgated the basic truth that the power making for righteous- ness in the world was a submerged element or conscious entity resi- dent within the area of mans being, amenable to conscious cultiva- tion and development by the intelligent effort of the conscious unit. But there is both interest and instruction in following the psycholo- 18. gists more detailed elaboration of his theses. It is fascinating to see how he arrives at his characterization of 'God' within the confines of our unconscious self. This is a matter demanding some mental dex- terity, since, he affirms, we are at once confronted with the most baf- fling obstacle to knowledge, in the fact that the unconscious, where God resides and operates upon our lives, is not an object of con- sciousness. It is admittedly an unpromising situation when we have to deal with something of which we can not be conscious. By sheer defini- tion the unconscious can not be brought under observation for study. It is the great unknown. In fact he says that we can predicate the unconscious only by noting its effects in our conscious realm and postulating for them a cause that operated in our unconscious. It is as if we become aware of forces impinging upon us from some mys- terious invisible source and logically have to predicate for them a cause lying in an unknown realm. We have a vague sense of being haunted by an imperceptible presence and power. We can only struggle to infer its nature from a study of its effects. Figure 6 Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882) 19. As Longfellow in Evangeline wrote: And behind the great unknown Standeth God within the shadow, Keeping watch oer all his own. From his thesis of the 'autonomous contents' of the unconscious Jung rationalizes the nature of those contents as 'divine': If we leave the idea of divinity out of account and speak only of autonomous contents, we maintain a position that is intellectually and empirically correct, but we silence a note which, psychologically, should not be missed. By using the concept of a divine being we give apt ex- pression to the peculiar way in which we experience the workings of these autonomous contents ... Therefore, by fixing the attribute divine to the workings of the autonomous contents we are admitting their rela- tively superior force ... It is a force as real as hunger and the fear of death. Here indeed is keen insight and clear recognition of forces at work within our souls. In the sum of our experience deep within the psy- che we inevitably come to feel that a power invisibly dominating our lives from a secret seat within us must be considered to be our fate, our destiny, our ruler,our God. (Or we would if we had not been hypnotized by ages of teaching that our God is off somewhere in remote heavens.) Whatever our outward mental indoctrination may have been, we are inexorably involved in the experience of psychic events that seem to testify to the presence of a controlling power within the psyche. Even though we may have extruded God from the hearthside of our innermost being, he thus still rules us from within ourselves. It is staggering to reflect how much we might aid him in his chore of rul- ing us if to the haunting sense of his presence and power we added the actual knowledge and recognition of his presence with us. 20. Remembering that Jung calls this overmastering divine power within us the 'self' (Theosophists usually capitalize it), a mere frag- ment of its universal totality constituting the single human ego con- sciousness, he clearly delineates the relation of this unit ego to the all-inclusive self: The individuated ego senses itself as the object of an unknown and su- perordinate subject. This subject, a consciousness of a superior orderso much so as to merit the name 'divine'Jung characterizes now as 'irrational,' since we can hardly think that our limited human reason can fathom or rationalize the great Mind of God. So he says: Sensing the self as something irrational, as an indefinable existent, to which the ego is neither opposed nor subjected, but merely attached, and about which it revolves very much as the earth revolves around the sun,thus we come to the goal of individuation ... In this relation noth- ing is knowable, because we can say nothing about the contents of the self. The ego is the only content of the self that we do know. And he then says that obviously: our psychological inquiry must come to a stop here, for the idea of a self is itself a transcendental postulate which, although justifiable psy- chologically, does not allow of scientific proof. For further pursuit of our inquiry, he says, we must take a step be- yond science, and we must make this leap into the unknown simply because: without this postulate I could give no adequate formulation to the psy- chic processes that occur empirically. At the very least, therefore, the self can claim the value of an hypothesis analogous to that of the structure of the atom. And even though that should be once again enmeshed in an image, it is none the less powerfully alive and its interpretation quite ex- ceeds my powers. I have no doubt at all that it is an image, but one in which we are contained. Here Jung gives expression to the great and necessary maximdear to the occultistthat we dare not limit our conclusions or our hy- potheses about such a power only to what science can demonstrate empirically. If we observe phenomena whose causes lie deeply submerged out of sight, we must project tentative theories to explain 21. them causally. If the theories provide adequate answers, they may be adopted at least tentatively as true. Science itself works hypo- thetically. From all this maze of experience and inference we arrive at the un- derstanding that in the deep dark recesses of our being there resides and constantly works a superior power of which we are uncon- scious. As it lies in this dark underworld, we have to plead our pov- erty of knowledge of it: In this field, hitherto so dark, it seems to me that there lie the answers which the psychology of consciousness has never even approached. Modern academic psychology, perhaps, but how about considering the psychology of occult science? We would venture to suggest to the eminent psychoanalyst that he could with great profit examine the arcane science of Theosophy. This science has pierced the dark regions both of the sub- and the superconscious area of the psyche and has found those answers he asserts lie there. Further interest is found in following Jungs identifications of the autonomous contents of the unconscious with mans God. This is illuminating because there is not present at first sight anything in the sphere of mans interior operation of conscious states that would ordinarily take on the character of sanctity or stir religious moods or values. Psychology, purely as science, seems to lie wholly in the field of spe- cifically secular, not religious interest. There would seem to be no more sanctity about our mental or psychic operations than, for in- stance, about physiology. Yet it is true that it is precisely in the do- main of our psychic life that religious motivations are generated. Certain casts of feeling, classed as spiritual or mystical, deep sens- ings and high afflations, lift man into the upper strata of the reli- gious atmosphere. So Jung writes: Religion is a worship of the highest and most powerful value, be it positive or negative ... You can accept, consciously, a value by which you are possessed unconsciously. The psychological fact which wields 22. the greatest power in your system functions as a god, since it is always the overwhelming psychic factor that is called God. As soon as a God ceases to be an overwhelming factor he dwindles to a mere name. His essence is dead and his power is gone. Then he asks why the gods of antiquity lost their prestige and their effect on the human soul and answers by saying that: the Olympians had served their time and a new mystery began: God became man. This startling pronouncement would have us infer that the more primitive people of antiquity had externalized the power controlling their lives, embodying it in deities whom they thought resided eve- rywhere in nature, as tree-gods, mountain-gods, water-gods, earth- gods, sky-gods. If the transition from belief in Gods-outside to Gods-inside came to replace the naturalistic concept with that of gods as the 'autonomous contents' within mans own psyche, and 'God became man,' one must challenge Jung for the evidence of so radical and sweeping a transposition of value and of understanding. To be sure, some evi- dence is at hand in St. Pauls declaration that the Christ-power is "within you, the hope of glory* for all men, and in the whole range of experience of saints in mystical Christology. Yet Jungs analysis that all our gods are just the creation of our own psychic projections, as he calls them, would today be rejected by 95% of religionists as almost a blasphemous insult to cosmic Deity. And a quite conclusive rebuttal of this thesis, if nowhere else, would be found to inhere in the fact that the Hindus are declared to have * The letter of Paul to the Colossians; Col. 1:26-27 (World English Bible, version 16- 2-2002): 26 the mystery which has been hidden for ages and generations. But now it has been revealed to his saints, 27 to whom God was pleased to make known what are the riches of the glory of this mystery among the Gentiles, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory; 23. postulated several hundred million gods.* We know that no human psyche ever conceived, or could conceive, that number of 'autono- mous contents' lurking in its depths. The Egyptians, Greeks and Romans exhausted their list at some 20. After all, it must be conceded to be against simple logic for man to accept the idea that, while he naively thinks that a great Power cre- ated him, he must believe the opposite when Jung informs him that he himself has created his supposed Creator! If we bow to Jung in this analysis of the origin of the God-concept in mans psychic life, we can do so only by ignoring the simplest premises of the human thought situation. As man sees orders of actual beings in the range of life below him in the world, it is for him a legitimate assumption that there are also beings in the range of life above him, and for these the term 'gods' seems an appropriate name. And it comes to him also as logically permissible to think of the total power creating the universe as 'God'. A repudiation of Jungs God-creating propensity on the part of man does not, to be sure obliterate the raw fact that man does impute to his gods and his God his own characterizations. In this the human mind simply endeavors to match the observed creation with the concept of a power adequate to account for it. And he must account for it under the terms of his own understanding. This does inevitably bend the human concept of God toward an an- thropomorphic pattern. The necessity for the concept is logical and the form or content of it is psychological. Man lives in and observes * Although, if you ask a learned Brahman how many gods there are in the Hindu pantheon, he will answer: Only one, Brahma, everything is Brahma, there is noth- ing outside Brahma. All other gods are just aspects of Brahma. This is considered 'pantheism', more or less comparable to what the Dutch phi- losopher Spinoza (1632-1677) described in his work Ethica ordine geometrico demon- strate, 1677 Not necessarily so. 24. the creation. He virtually must assume that it is the work of an intel- ligent power able to produce it as it is. If this is what Jung means by mans creating his gods, it is a truism. But against his more specific claims stands the historical fact that the wisest of men have dis- tinctly refrained from giving any descriptive character to the God power. For they denominated it the Unknown, and discouraged all efforts to characterize it. Since Jung virtually identifies this God power in the dark depths of our unconscious with the 'self,' it will clarify the concept further if we examine this feature more closely: I have chosen the term self to designate the totality of man, the sum total of his conscious and unconscious contents. I have chosen this term in accordance with the Eastern philosophy, which for centuries has oc- cupied itself with the problems that arise when even the gods cease to incarnate. The philosophy of the Upanishads corresponds to a psychology that long ago recognized the relativity of the gods. This is not to be confused with a stupid error like atheism. The world is as it ever has been, but our con- sciousness undergoes peculiar changes. First it was rejected ... (then) through the withdrawal of projections conscious knowledge slowly developed ... this was the first stage in the despiritualization of the world. Pause must be made here to gather up the threads of the psycholo- gists argument. Since, he affirms, man creates his gods, they can not be actual existent entities, but vary with the ideas man 'projects' about them. Hence he speaks of the 'relativity' of the gods. If man creates them, surely they are purely relative to the modes and models he conceives for them. Man must inevitably project his con- ceptions of them, and they are to him only what these projections make them in his psychological world. But as mans intelligence in- creased he discarded or withdrew earlier and cruder projections and substituted more rational ones. At the cruder stage of conceptuality man had localized the God power in earth and sky, trees, hills, animals. Later ideas tended to make a 'Great Spirit' pervading all nature. And now a subtler re- 25. finement of the concept, says Jung, sees God as an element in the unconscious of man himself. And he speaks of this transmutation of the concept as a 'despiritualization' of the world. An objective view of life, as it always has done, tended to make God less transcendental and 'spiritual,' and more a natural force visibly operating through familiar physical channels. Much as in the pro- gress of medical science, in which earlier hypotheses were found erroneous and had to give way to new ones, later found also to be erroneous, the God concept in human ideation has undergone radi- cal changes, as one set of 'projections' had to yield to others, the culminating one at last being the recognition that God is not up there in a cosmic paradise, but is an all-controlling mysterious agency lurking in the depths of our own unconscious selves. So Jung says that modern mentality has subtilized these projections to an almost unrecognizable degree. But our ordinary life: still swarms with them, in newspapers, books, rumors and ordinary so- cial gossip. All gaps in our actual knowledge are still filled out with pro- jections ... we must still be exceedingly careful not to project our own shadows too shamelessly; we are still swamped with projected illu- sions. Even when one silences this rampant noisy stream of projections, he is still confronted with new problems and conflicts and has become a serious problem to himself, as he is unable to say where he stands, whether new illusions are better than old. But such a man knows, says Jungand it is a startling realization that: whatever is wrong with the world is in himself, and if he only learns to deal with his own shadow [his own illusory projections] he has done something real for the world. He has succeeded in shouldering at least an infinitesimal part of the gigantic unsolved social problems of our day. These problems are mostly so difficult because they are poisoned by mutual projections. How can any one see straight when he does not even see himself and the darkness he unconsciously carries with him into all his dealings? 26. Jung here is stamping his feet vigorously on Theosophic ground, as Theosophy sees the same mass projection of outrageously erroneous ideas and asks the same question. As the most direct approach to a sane answer Theosophy today repeats the advice of the sage Greek Theosophists of old: Man, know thyself. * Figure 7 Fragment of a mosaic from the Saint-Gregory Convent in Rome exhibi- ting the inscription in Greek gnwqi sauton (know thyself) And occultists today would urge even Dr. Jung to study our phi- losophy, which embraces also a profounder psychology than he, with all his notable achievement, has produced. The ancient wis- dom, with its more specific knowledge of the constitution of man, provides competent ground for the formulation of sound instead of crotchety conceptions of the ways of God with man. Well does the Theosophist know that man stands in the shadow of his own underself, his own misbelief, for he himself has had to un- dergo the painful experience of tearing his mind loose from a thou- sand false impositions of exoteric doctrinism, mainly foisted upon * Thales' . Most likely it was a popular proverb, which tended later to be attributed to particular sages such as Bias of Priene, Chilon of Sparta, Cleobulus of Lindus, Heraclitus, Myson of Chenae, Periander, Pittacus of Mity- lene, Pythagoras, Socrates, Solon of Athens, Thales of Miletus. 27. the credulous uncritical masses by priestcraft to perpetuate the hold of entrenched ecclesiasticism upon the populace of every age from Atlantis to Europe. Figure 8 Portrait of the (imaginary or real?) Master Koot Hoomi by Hermann Schmiechen, 1884. The Master K.H. says pointedly* that Theosophy was republished to the modern world for the express purpose of emancipating the masses from tragic hallucinations that wreaked psychological havoc with the millions. Yes, modern life is still darkened by the macabre shadows of warped theologiesagainst which H.P. Blavatsky railed with justifiable vehemencecast out over the Hellenic world about the third century by the combined forces of intellectual decadence and fanatical pietism that swept Christianity into popular favor, and * Koot Hoomi (also spelled Kuthumi, and frequently referred to simply as K.H.) is one of the Mahatmas that inspired the founding of the Theosophical Society. He engaged in a correspondence with two English Theosophists living in India, A.P. Sinnett and A.O. Hume, correspondence was published in the book The Mahatma Letters to A. P. Sinnett. 28. which then deepened into the dismal night of the Dark Ages of Me- dieval Europe. Figure 9 Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (1831-1891) Theosophy knows what fatal falsity the common mind is capable of imposing upon itself when it has not the light of occult wisdom to guide it to truth. A clamoring host of the most intriguing questions arise from reflec- tion on the data of knowledge that psychoanalysis has formulated from both clinical investigation and theoretical study. There will not be room here to discuss these. The colossal fact that Jung thrusts be- fore us is the truth that our conscious life is but a tiny island in the vast sea of the unconscious, in which the forces that dominate us, which he says we conceive to be our gods, approach our shores in the twilight in dim shapes and mysterious ways. The tiny ego in man faces the task of trying to put its life into har- monious relation to the forces, influences, and intimations that im- 29. pinge upon his consciousness from out this great sea of divine or demoniac powers. Jung has expressed in the modern psychological way what occult philosophy views as the effort of the individual ego to align its life with the oversoul of the universe, or what is commonly called the Mind of God. In terms of both yoga and common religion, it is mans instinctual drive to achieve union with God. A most absorbing idea presented by Jungs theorizing is his conclu- sion as to what he calls the despiritualization of the world mind. It points to the increased momentum now most certainly to be given to the trends, already under way, in psychology that will transfer the phenomena of consciousness formerly assigned to the domain of supernatural religion or external god-powers over into the realm of our own human capabilities. This will mean what might better be called the de-religionizing of a horde of supposed God-born influ- ences by effecting their transfer to the field of regular science, or psychology. So the trend is from the vague spiritism of religion to the precise science of psychology. The phenomena will be correctly seen as native to man himself, in- digenous to him by virtue of his own equipment and endowment of faculty, having nothing to do with outside deific entities or gods. In other words, a vast segment of presumed religious experience here- tofore believed to emanate from gods outside, will be completely secularized, or humanized. Science will lop off a vast slice of what has gone as religion, speak- ing in the broadest terms. Jung concludes with the direct assertion that as we wisely learn to dismantle all the fantastic 'projections' that we can lay our hands upon, it will be no longer possible to maintain any non-psychological doctrine about the gods. If the historic proc- ess of world despiritualization continues as heretofore, then every- thing of a divine or demoniac character outside must return to the psyche, to the inside of the unknown man, whence it apparently originated. Man must bring inside the gods he has searched for outside, avers 30. the eminent psychologist. One can already hear the yowl of the shocked theistic religious parties, as they protest that this is to drag the holy powers of God down into the miry swamp of mans sinful life. It will besmirch the divine purity with foul human corruption. Jung, as any Theosophist, could turn this argument right back upon them by reminding them that this thing they call a vile defilement of God by man is precisely what their own Gospel Jesus, their human- ized Christ, said he came to do! He despised not the Virgins womb and the assumption of our mortal flesh. And if Jung was fully wise Theosophically, he could also remind them that the presence and the power of the nucleated individual ego, or the self within the Self, is itself an imperishable unit of the God principle and will by spiritual alchemy transmute the base hu- man elements into purest spiritual gold!