The Blackberry Walk

In truth, my interesting in psychology and Jung's work has never primarily been 'psychological' in nature. My focus doesn't sit on the 'truth' or validity of these works in the scientific sense, which Jung so wanted his work to be understood as, but rather as a worldview - a way of understanding the world. Psychology has always had a rough position. Is it a science? Kind of, but those who wanted to make psychology into a science - the Behaviourists and CBT enthusiasts - desperately attempted turn man into machine, into an automaton which statistically performed as expected. But, despite being biological, man just doesn't work like that. Sure, some findings over the nature of the mind have been found, but has anything been figured out about psyche? Shouldn't experience of psyche be primary to the study of it? Next psychology wonders "Am I a humanity?". Many features between the two are similar, such as the interpretive side of experiencing psyche through images, feelings and thoughts. So there is a greater kinship towards the humanities. However for myself, psychology isn't merely human in nature - through the worldviews it engenders, it gives a sense of the divine. Back in the Renaissance, the term 'humanities' was coined to separate the human affairs of the written word from the word - the study of God. You can imagine the breakdown as follows:

1. Divinity - the study of God
2. Humanities - the study of Man
3. Sciences - the study of Nature

Much of the psychology which interests me is an attempt at grappling with the notions of the divine, an attempt to understand mystical experience and discover what is greater than the ego sitting in his castle. Philosophy has the same effect for me. Philosophy in it's academic form is an attempt at truth through the fine scalpel of the Socratic method, however that angle of it has never interested me. As a dilettante side-line observer, I wanna see some philosophers come up with some really cool worldviews, and then I wanna see how well I can fit my current beliefs and experiences with it (so long as it fits my aesthetics). It's a kind of academic grooming akin to the the rat utopia's Beautiful Ones. For me and many others, Jung fits snuggly into the fissure of science and theology, forming a sort of bridge between the two. He offers the perfect headdress and scarf with which to decorate ourselves, to attempt to touch the supramundane whilst keeping our feet connected to the mundane myths of the modern millennium. But through Jung's ideas we find a spirituality for one, a model of completion alone. Gnostic is a good way to describe Jung's spirituality. Despite not putting it in moralistic terms, for Jung the outside world is full of confusion and shifting shapes of stimulus which can only be understood through our projection of ideas onto it, whilst the interior world is where the Platonic forms come to life and dance in the divine theatre of the imaginal and, once deeper layers are excavated, intemporal Gods who've been directing your every move since birth emerge to greet you. The dualism characterises much of Jung's work - a truly personal myth for someone as introverted and inward-looking as Jung was. What Jung strove for was completion in one person - becoming whole alone. Wholeness is a powerful, powerful archetypal force. A good example is in the sciences, where their priests go mad and fantasise over achieving the theory of everything. Much like an alchemical projection into the material, they will never rest easy until they unify their equations and in turn unify the world and themselves. But to actualise this ever-gnawing archetype of wholeness in a world of such evident imperfection is an impossibility. The religious solution is the realm of heaven - the divine realm of the gods where perfection and harmony does exist. Christianity even goes so far as to offer the good people passage to the world of the One, albeit in the afterlife. Plato and Gnostic sects inspired by his Timaeus imagined the world of completeness as shining down into the world of the everyday as the incompleteness we experience - that the true world of completeness was up there and we live in a mere shadow of it. But since then, one-ness and completeness became an untenable fantasy and have fallen into disrepute under scientific advancements. Many see Jung as someone who's brought back this sense of one-ness, but the one-ness Jung brought back from the scrapheap of ideas which science has lain waste to was a personal one-ness. A one-ness in oneself. A one-ness which can't be shared. One-ness has an arch nemesis in the archetypal arena: nothingness. Everything is ones and zeros. It's all or nothing. And for Jung the one-ness of the inner world, of the Self, is contrasted with the zero-ness of the outside world. The outer world has sensory input fused in a molten cauldron with projections of inner fantasies, creating a Dreamtime of a decidedly fake world. Outer changes in the world of real things are all rituals, enacting alchemical transformations of the soul - the concrete world is just the playground with which the psyche transforms itself. The hallowed yet hollowed world of panpsychism. Now, I'm not saying Jung believed all of this. But when the myth of 'completeness' only exists in a single person, it is to the exclusion of all else, by the same method which Jung described as 'shadow projection'. The elevation of the self results in a devaluation of what's outside. Jung's Kantian influenced view of the psyche, wherein we can never know the world in-of-itself but only our perceptions of it, forced him to come up with a theory of archetypes, of synchronicity, of psychic reality, since without these theories the logical conclusion is solipsism. Dire loneliness without another real soul in the world. One's own brimming wholeness and vitality, at the expense of the desert beyond your walls.