Recognizing Constellations of World Life in the Psychic Field
John Dotson
Monterey Peninsula Friends of C. G. Jung
November 3, 2005
Description
The part of the unconscious which is designated as the subtle body becomes more and more identical with the functioning of the body, and therefore it grows darker and darker and ends in the utter darkness of matter. . . . Somewhere our unconscious becomes material, because the body is the living unit, and our conscious and our unconscious are embedded in it: they contact the body. Somewhere there is a place where the two ends meet and become interlocked. And that is the [subtle body] where one cannot say whether it is matter, or what one calls "psyche."
C. G. Jung, Nietzsche's Zarathustra
We will consider together Jung's description of the subtle body, and his diagram of the somatic, spiritual, and collective unconscious and consciousness, in order better to understand our experiences of personal catastrophe and collective catastrophes such as those of Hurricane Katrina and the Kashmir earthquake and the ongoing traumas of world life in our times.
Introduction
If you want to turn to the books, you could begin with Jung and Nathan Schwartz-Salant and search their indexes with any approach one prefers: psychology theoretical and applied, or alchemy in its more Christian contexts and presentations. One could also turn to On the Mystical Shape of the Godhead: Basic Concepts in the Kabbalah by Gershom Scholem. A powerful resource is Henry Corbin’s Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn ‘Arabi. In the Buddhist tradition, my immediate thought is Pema Chödrön, director of Gampo Abbey in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, and author of The Wisdom of No Escape, Start Where You Are and When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times.
Let’s think of Mother India. Sri Aurobindo writes in The Synthesis of Yoga that:
"we regard the spirit in man not as solely an individual being traveling to a transcendent unity with the Divine, but as a universal being capable of oneness with the Divine in all souls and all Nature…The individual Yoga then turns from its separateness and becomes a part of the collective Yoga of the divine Nature….All life is the play of universal forces. The individual gives a personal form to these universal forces."
In Social and Political Thought, Aurobindo writes
"these ideas are likely first to declare their trend in philosophy, in psychological thinking, in the arts, poetry, painting, sculpture, music, in the main idea of ethics, in the application of subjective principles by thinkers to social questions, even perhaps, though this is a perilous effort, to politics and economics, that hard refractory earth matter which most resists all but a gross utilitarian treatment. There will be new unexpected departures of science…. Discoveries will be made that thin the walls between soul and matter."
Steven M. Rosen presents an effective summary of many “unexpected departures of science” in his Dimensions of Apeiron: A Topological Phenomenology of Space, Time, and Individuation. Rosen’s work, as he puts it, “coincides with the two main stages of the alchemical opus. The motto of alchemy was solve et coagula, ‘dissolve and coagulate.’” Apeiron, is “the early Greek word for what is ‘limitless,’ ‘boundless,’…the unintelligible; the many; the moving; the ugly; the bad…the inchoate flux of opposites or contraries…the principle of disorder or disharmony…. In its sheer boundlessness, apeiron defies containment within the ordering contexts of space and time.” I strongly recommend Steve Rosen’s work for those who want state-of-the-art textuality of the entire accomplishment of Western philosophy and science and the thinning of walls between soul and matter.
http://www.gebser.org/pivot/entry.php?id=10#comm