The Blackberry Walk

Some years ago, I had a vision of a kind of Roman temple. Inside, there was a kind of courtyard of sorts where a kind of shining mist descends from above into the courtyard’s pool. This I implicitly understood to be a symbol for the working of the mind. The question then arose: is the operation of the mind interior or exterior? Do we have thoughts, or do we observe thoughts as we observe light, sound, or smell? We all believe from birth that we have thoughts. We imagine the great thinkers of the past, these inspired individuals, to be so smart that they are inspired with great ideas. The word ‘inspired’ can be dissected into ‘in-spired’, to be breathed in to, by a spirit (spirit is breath, pneuma, etc, I’ve explained this enough times on this blog). As Carl Jung put it, people don’t possess ideas; ideas possess people. We become infatuated with ideologies granted, but there are ideas to which we are so much in thrall, that they form the very cosmologies of our normal lives - the very ground beneath which we walk. Jung is an interesting case. Jung sees archetypes as a kind of Platonic form within the soul; all of the metaphysical/phenomenological aspects of Jungianism, I reckon, can be seen as an inversion of Platonism where the forms aren’t outside of us, but rather within us projecting out. The interior world is a modern notion, one not present in times of old. Moods were something which passed over you as various spirits passed through your body and altered how you acted; not the whims from within we now imagine. The body was a container of sorts, possessing both flesh and soul - soul being the animating (anima is ancient Greek for soul) force of the flesh - where spirits could breeze through and bring personality. To continue with the reverse Jungian analogy, Jungian complexes are an internalisation of these spirits. The complex makes itself known in response to certain outside factors, wherein it can’t help itself but project out onto it. Equally however, you could say that you are weak to the spirits of certain people or objects and they breeze into you, partly possessing you. Jung recognised the God-shaped hole in each one of us and named it ‘the Self’ - the archetype meant to represent wholeness. Whilst one angle Jung takes with the self is therapeutic, involving mandalas and healing fractured neurotic personalities, with Jung there is always the second metaphysical angle to consider. Jung saw the Self as the archetype which expects the wholeness conferred by the image of Christ. But because Jung’s system claims in ‘inside world’ is more real than the ‘outside world’, the Jungian system can only reject the action of being filled with the Holy Spirit. After all, the inside is full of archetypes and the outside is a barren wasteland of dry matter waiting to be moistened with vitality from the archetypes.¹ What if we were to invert this paradigm, and believe that things actually exist? There’s an odd hubris in thinking the many spiritual and magical things are confined to our small brain boxes. And more than strange, I believe it to be unhealthy and incorrect. What if instead we were hollow? Spirits and moods wash over us, affecting us, occupying our hollow interiors. These spirits needn’t control us, however; it is virtuous to cultivate character to resist these forces. But how best do we do that? By filling the emptiness within. As St. Paul says, our bodies are temples (1 Cor. 6), making reference to when Jesus says he will destroy and rebuilt the temple in three days, referring to His own body (John 2). Our bodies are temples in so far as they house the Holy Spirit in the same way the Temple in Jerusalem housed God. But for God to live amongst the Israelites, certain measures had to be put in place. Firstly, the people of Israel had to remain clean of spiritual filth, otherwise known as sin, so that God could stand to abide there. And secondly strict rules were put in place for how God was approached so as to protect them from the sheer force of God’s holiness. Nabab and Abihu, two sons of Aaron, died due to giving an improper sacrifice, and were consumed in holy flame (Lev. 10). In this same vein, we are temples, and for the Holy Spirit to reside in us we must avoid sin and seek virtue, by loving God, and loving our neighbours. The danger of the power of God can still be seen in Ananias and Sapphira who lied to the Holy Spirit about how much money they received when selling land to fund the nascent church, and died as a result (Acts 5). Indeed, we are empty, waiting to by filled by the Spirit to transform our flesh and in time attain the ‘spiritual bodies’ St. Paul talks of (1 Cor. 15). If the Tabernacle is a representation of Eden where God walked with Adam in the garden, through cleansing our temples we’re gardening our hollow interiors to become suitable for the Spirit to dwell. In short, the world outside of you is real and the interior world of vague thoughts and feelings is phony. To make everything outside a mere referent to the inside world is self-defeating, since for anything to matter, it has to have matter, and intrinsically possess that truth. Believing that there is so much nous, thought, and feelings that belong to you will also only fill us with pride. And we don’t want to be filled with pride, lest their be no space left for the Spirit. 1. I ought to recognise and concede that this depiction of Jung’s ideas isn’t wholly accurate. Jung, through ideas like synchronicity, did believe in something more than dry formless matter in the world, in the form of a kind of Goethe-inspired world soul. Jung can be quite a slippery customer, never maintaining a cohesive worldview.