The Blackberry Walk

My previous weekly posting schedule has ended after having won the weekly blogging competition against Iklone. Going forward, I aim to write longer pieces with the hope of improving my writing style. Christianity has always avoided dream interpretation. It isn’t as if dream interpretation isn’t part of biblical history, since there are the examples of important dreams from God, like those of Joseph and Daniel. But dream interpretation, as understood in modern psychoanalysis, and as understood by pagan cultures across time and the world over, is never seen. Dreams are where demons attack. The succubus, the erotic demon who arouses its prey through dreams, chooses the night. Demons are associated with darkness and the night, after all, and struggle to sustain themselves beneath the clarity of light. Call it a motif or symbolism if you wish, but there is always a sense of reality in symbolism. The oak tree is symbolically wise and strong, not due to any cultural association, but due to the reality of the oak tree: an oak tree is old, hard to topple, and hard to saw. Similarly, the symbolism of a demon cloaked in the darkness of night reflects upon the qualities of a demon. The demon is afraid of light, because when God’s light exposes them, they cease to be; and because come nightfall, demons do frolic and cackle and play mischief. I speak from personal experience through lucid dreams. I have never sought out lucid dreaming through techniques or practice, but now and again I fall into them when struggling to sleep, usually at around four in the morning. I hear a loud tinnitus-like ringing sound, as mandalic imagery glows across my vision, and I’m thrust into a waking dream. What I’ve discovered from these experiences, is that dreams come from demons. The last few times I’ve descended to one of these Orphic states, I’ve elected to spend my lucid dream praying. Almost at once, the antibodies of the dream world soak my submissive half-asleep mind with feelings of terror. The demons are afraid. But the last time this happened, I spoke Christ’s name, remembering a biblical passage explaining how demons were cast out in His name. And, I heard the demons in a squeaky alien-like voice say Jesus’ name four times as if they were scurrying away afraid as I awoke, accompanied by mandalas. A strange introduction to an article, perhaps. Granted, it may well be a little self-indulgent. But my original point remains: Christianity has little time for dreams. As even those before the psychoanalysts would acknowledge, albeit expressed in different terms, dreams come from the unconscious mind. The unconscious mind, as the psychoanalysts understood it, was full of demons. The Jungian concept of complexes, which was present in Freudian theory before Jung and Freud fissured their friendship, essentially describes a demon. But one inside of you. A complex controls you, compelling you to certain actions, ceasing you up when referenced, and prevents you from hearing information unpleasant to it. In the Jungian framing, the complex is self-sustaining, with its own wants, aims, and means, of which you are unconscious. Regularly, a complex doesn’t have full control over the host, and can only bend and affect your actions. However, in extreme circumstances, the complex can ‘possess’ you, and take hold of your body for a short while, managing your thoughts and actions. All in all, these complexes sound very much like demons. And when you consider archetypes as ancient parts of psyche directing and orienting man, they sound like master demons inhabiting not the individual, but his lineage; not the ontogeny, but the phylogeny. Indeed, an archetype is a demon strapped to mankind, baggage each man carries from his birth: the archetypes are the demons of original sin. Now this may sound quite ‘just so’, equating direct parallels as I am. And especially given that archetypes in the Jungian model are often of good things - think the ‘wise old man’ and the ‘mother’. But wisdom can still exist without an archetype, even if under the Jungian model it would be hard for the mind to identify. And so too would motherhood. In fact, the archetype often detracts from the original feeling. To inhabit and be possessed by an archetype can be a powerful thing, but it is in fact idolatry. If the mother were to inhabit the archetype of motherhood and see herself solely as a mother, she would forget that she is before all other things made in God’s image. But there is a great feeling of power one feels from allowing someone to project upon you in this way. For a woman to project upon you this ‘father/lover’ archetype, and vice versa, is a most potent feeling many of you will have experienced. In kind, if you were to project upon another archetypes of wisdom, you will experience a different kind of idolatry; the kind of idolatry where you feel insignificant compared to the epitome before you, where you take the word of this perceived ‘wise man’ as gospel. The archetypal vision described is a kind of falsehood, to see a blurred vision of the world and your neighbour, coloured by the archetypal palette. These are distractions from reality, much like how the passions distract, blur, and colour our thoughts, beliefs, and interactions: we are drunk on the falsehood of sin. Christianity is the sobriety of thought. In becoming a Christian, there is far more to cease to believe in than to start believing in. Armed with that characteristic of German idealism - verbose secularised Christianity - Jung would agree. Jung would agree that the complexes and archetypes are but distractions; for Jung, the spiritual journey is to resolve complexes and incorporate archetypes, in search of the hidden but most potent archetype of the Self: the archetype of totality, transcending all other archetypes. Jung describes moving from the ego to the Self as moving from the geocentric model to the heliocentric model, since the hierarchy of size, power, and dominance must be inverted. Jung says Christ is a symbol of the Self . Jung doesn’t want to venerate archetypes and complexes: he wants to step on the shoulders of archetypes to reach the Self, and allow the blazing light of consciousness to eviscerate the demons of complexes. All this not mediated by the individual, but through a kind of dialogue between therapist and patient, like between priest and layman. Why is Jung wrong? Jung is wrong because he is a gnostic. And I don’t say that casually, he is truly a gnostic. In one of his last works, Answer to Job, Jung argues for the perspective of the Marcionites, a proto-gnostic group, stating the God of the Old Testament was evil, and the God of the New Testament found in Christ is good. But even excluding this later work, in his main corpus of work, Jung’s focus has always been with engaging and interacting with demons in order to learn from them and ascend, instead of simply vanquishing them. Jung sets out a path for the incorporation of archetypes, starting with the Shadow, then the Anima, and several others, before ending with the Self, and the Individuation process. In the Red Book, Jung explicitly talks at length with the complexes of his own imagination, exalting them at times into great beings beyond his control, such as his discussions with Philemon. These demons of imagination and dreams Jung aims to tame, much like a kind of Dr Faustus. And, as Jung discovered, demons appear most vividly in dreams and imagination, particularly his practice of active imagination. This is why the Christian tradition distrusts divination and diagnosis by dreams. As any recorder of dreams knows, the moment you start writing your dreams down night by night, the more vivid and frequent your dreams become. Engaging with this ‘spirit realm’ excites it ever-more, until, in the case of Jung, the wall between the realm of dream and the realm of reality thins and cracks. Where Jung sees a Narnia, the Christian sees a Tartarus. Where Jung trusts his flesh, his visions, and his ability to taunt and engage demons, the Christian distrusts his flesh, and recognises his susceptibility to demons. And realises he shouldn’t have any such dealings. Jung was a fan of Tibetan Buddhism. His beloved mandalas, whilst being observed in cultures across the world, are most famed in Tibet. The very notion of the anima, I have good reason to suspect, came from his reading on Tibet also, especially from his friendship with Richard Wilhelm. The Tibetans have a technique where they visualise an imaginary woman, and practice making this internal vision submissive to him. As part of this technique, the Tibetan Buddhist monk uses women, many of whom are taken by force from local villages, to taunt and harden himself by what is in essence raping them without ejaculating. Many of these women are also young girls, sometimes before maturity. Tibetan Buddhism is a horrible thing, do not trust the Dalai Lama. But the main purpose of this practice is to conquer the passions through a kind of self-mastery of this internal woman, leading to the point at which you are superior to those demons. This form of ‘spiritualism’ is founded upon taunting the flesh and provoking the demons, only to bat them away and fight off the hoard, in order to harden yourself to temptation. The Tantras write explicitly that monks summons the gods from heaven in order to make them submissive to him. However metal this may sound, these are at root evil practices; and, in my opinion, pseudo-gnostic practices. The Tibetan Buddhist monk looks inwards to build his own strength, because his salvation, Nirvana, is at odds with the evil world outside. The outside world, God’s own Creation, is a prison in the mind of the Buddhist, a circle of torture, suffering, and reincarnation ad infinitum. Given his mistaken belief about the purpose of Creation, the Buddhist mistakenly believes the principalities and powers still work for God, and that the demons in control of this world are akin to the archons, the henchmen of the Demiurge, found in gnosticism. But the Christian knows this to be untrue. The Christian knows that the principalities and powers, those celestial beings God entrusted with the protection of the nations of the world, had fallen, and had succumbed to be worshipped as idols, distancing themselves from His grace. These fallen gods the Buddhist monk taunts are demons, and these demons are not in communion with the Creator. The Buddhist thinks the world is suffering from beginning to its end; whilst the Christian knows the world is suffering with the exception of its beginning and end. Jung’s insistence on engaging, incorporating, and at times aggressing the principalities and powers searched for within, is in-line with the Buddhist understanding of self-overcoming rather than a Christian one; it is a sense of self-overcoming in-line with a gnostic view, an inverted Christian view. The principle mistake is in thinking an overcoming of demons will bring you any closer to the Creator, whereas in reality they only aim to distract you from Him. Instead of relying on God to overcome any and all demonic adversity, owing to our weakness as men, the gnostic takes the task upon himself. Instead of relying on the light of God to eviscerate demons, Jung relies on the light of ego-consciousness to eviscerate complexes. Despite what I might have said thus far, I retain love of Jungian thought, though I now think it to be wrong. I think back to St. Augustine’s Confessions. Before his conversion to Christianity, and his rise to become the cornerstone of Western thought, St. Augustine was a Manichee. These followers of the prophet Mani blended gnosticism, Platonism, Zoroastrianism, and all the science and philosophy of his day into a kind of proto-Theosophical ecumenistic oafing beast. Riffing on St. John’s metaphors of lightness and darkness (parallels of which are also found in the Dead Sea Scrolls), and wedding them to Zoroastrianism’s Ahura Mazda and Ahriman, Mani birthed an ascetical faith focused on abandoning the world utterly to find the light within. Once a staunch proponent of this composite faith, Augustine the Manichee critiqued and argued with the priests of the sect, until he converted to the Christian faith. After his conversion, when confronted with the sophistry of the lightness and darkness, he rebutted thus: what is darkness but an absence of light? It is only our lack of faith distancing us from God and His eternal light. Much hay has been made since on how influenced St. Augustine was by his Manichaean youth. Such books I have seen arguing that the very act of writing the Confessions, one of the first known autobiographies, is an example of his conception of an internalised self, of a slightly more gnostic understanding of the soul than what came before. This hay is munched at by the Orthobros, and those, like the Nietzscheans, who see the Western project from Socrates to today as a mistake. And, in truth, the connection can be made. Looking into myself, I see my thought and the way I see the world as being heavily influenced by my Jungian thought. Did all the Troskyites who become Neoconservatives ever lose their Red upbringing? And can anyone truly move from one nation to another a naturalise in taste and manners? Probably not. There will always be the mild dye of Jungianism in me, and the mild dye of Manichaeanism in St. Augustine. And, despite his great holiness, the great defender against Pelagius probably wouldn’t want you thinking otherwise. But such inversions of the truth are great stepping stones. To cross into a new faith, a new way of thinking, alien to your upbringing, is to ford a wide, deep river. There are shallower regions of the river where a skilled wader may aid your crossing, but those without a guide on their own adventure, following their own intuition can’t help but dry off and rest on the islet sitting in the middle of the river. After the struggle of the journey, one may even mistake the small, limited island for destination. But just as Odysseus ran from Ogygia, so too must we swim to the land on the other side, away from the Calypso copycats of Mani and Jung. Whilst I learnt much, and gained much, I have reached the other side. Thank you, Jung, and goodbye.