Carl Gustav Jung 1875-1961 – A Forerunner

Carl Gustav Jung was a Swiss psychiatrist who is principally remembered, together with Sigmund Freud, as one of the founding fathers of Western psychology. The professional association between Jung and Freud diverged at the juncture where Jung developed analytical psychology as distinct from psychoanalysis. Jung’s work continues to influence modern psychiatry and psychology, as well as philosophy and literature. He created many modern psychological concepts: archetypal phenomena, the collective unconscious, introversion, extraversion and synchronicity, to mention but a few. His early work was principally concerned with establishing a structural account of the human personality as the basis upon which he sought to understand psychopathology. This he did through a scientific process of self-experimentation that overtook him, literally, and continued to occupy him for the rest of his life. Jung’s psychology was consummated in his “attempt to provide a temporal account of higher development, which he termed the individuation process.”[1] He painstakingly documented, commented upon and revised his accounts in Liber Novus, The Red Book.

Jung sought to identify aspects of the human psyche so that consolidation and integration of its differentiated elements could occur, “in order to produce the transcendent function, which arose out of the union of conscious and unconscious (individual and collective) content”.[2] In December 1916, Jung stated in the preface of a book he published that the “psychological processes that accompanied the war had brought the problem of the chaotic unconscious to the forefront of attention”. He further determined that “the psychology of the individual corresponded to the psychology of the nation and only the transformation of the attitude of the individual could bring about cultural renewal.”[3] This strikes a resonant chord with the esoteric philosophy revealed by the Tibetan and recorded in the ‘Blue Books’ written by Alice A. Bailey, notably in Destiny of the Nations and in the five volumes of The Treatise On The Seven Rays

Jung articulated the interconnection between the inner world of the individual and the collective events of the outer world, which eventually formed the center of Jung’s psychology. Through The Red Book, Liber Novus, published in 2009 almost fifty years after his death, Jung’s mature voice speaks once again, aided by the masterful insights and personal experiences of Peter Kingsley in his most powerful work to date, Catafalque, Carl Jung And The End of Humanity. (2018).

In this paper, I attempt to highlight parallels between the intuitive insights of Carl Jung, meticulously described and recorded over the decades he worked on The Red Book between 1914 and 1930, and the esoteric teachings of the Tibetan recorded in the ‘Blue Books’ written by Alice Bailey between 1919-1949. I explicitly mention only a few, but many others may be evident if simply left to speak for themselves.

“The years, of which I have spoken to you, when I pursued the inner images, were the most important time of my life. Everything else is to be derived from this. It began at that time and later details hardly matter anymore. My entire life consisted in elaborating what had burst forth from the unconscious and flooded me like an enigmatic stream and threatened to break me. That was the stuff and material for more than only one life. Everything later was merely the outer classification, the scientific elaboration, and the integration into life. But the numinous beginning, which contained everything, was then.”[4]

“Asmenos ek thanatoio “ are words from Homer’s Odyssey meaning, “Glad to have escaped from death”.[5] These are the words Carl Jung recommended as “the best possible motto for the story of his life”.[6] Perhaps they reveal something about the strength of the ordeals he faced, through his visions and dreams, on the heroic quest of a knight in search of the Holy Grail. Perhaps his personal quest was undertaken because for a person such as Jung, “Man cannot stand a meaningless life”.[7]

The legacy of Carl Jung was left to Humanity. His worldly work continues through the archetypal life of the light-bringer. His previously private and unpublished journals and letters, reveal the carefully concealed scope of Jung’s own science and psychology. He describes, in detail, the archetypal life he discovered within himself. “Glad to have escaped from death”, he was finally able to live the truly ordinary life – an extraordinary life when compared to what counts for ordinary in the glamorous world of materialism. He was consciously able to leave the energy he embodied – the energy he recognized as the cosmic Christ in him – alone, allowing Christ to do his work in the world through him. Jung’s personal, and at times terrifying experiments with the archetypes he sought to identify brought him not only to the brink of madness, but to the conscious realization that ultimately, “the archetypes are all there is. To the extent that we are humans we participate in, we are, the archetypes of humanity: the Anthropos, The Christ”.[8]

An original record has resurfaced of the highly significant dream Jung had in Kolkata, something that remained unpublished even in Jung’s authorized autobiography. The message Jung received in this dream was this: “Seek for yourself and for the sake of your fellow humans the healing vessel, the servator mundi, which you urgently need”.[9] Jung’s quest for the ‘healing vessel’ led him to experience the totality of human consciousness as the archetypal consciousness of Christ – Servator or Salvatore Mundi – saviour of the world. He discovered our individual lives are not really individual at all; they are not ‘personal’. For Jung, ordinary life was living as the whole body of Christ. His process of individuation was no more or less than the process of discovering one single, critical, fact: the secret of individuation is simply becoming the Holy Grail, the vessel of the cosmic Christ. Jung, as the embodiment of Christ as Humanity, existed to save, or redeem the world. Jung’s process of individuation was about the conscious experience of coming to directly know and live that. For Jung, the personal ‘ego’ of the individual was something to be integrated into the impersonal, collective ‘Ego’ and used in service to the divine.

To be clear, Jung’s identification with the archetype of the world saviour was far from an inflationary psychosis or some form of neurosis often seen in institutional settings, and outside them for that matter. (I have observed many forms of pathological psychology during the years I worked in psychiatric hospitals). It also explains the paradoxical reason Jung always warned anyone involved with archetypal psychology that, above all, one should never identify with the archetypes. To do so risked falling victim to the massive inflation of the individual personality, which tragically, is the very thing that prevents the ‘seeker’ from becoming the Grail, the holy vessel. When we leave the mysterious alone, far from disappearing, its magic is free to reveal itself.

Jung knew the process of individuation requires a lifetime of struggle, of willingness to battle pain and suffering. According to the Tibetan, Earth has a Fourth Ray Soul and a Fifth Ray personality[SM1] . Hence, through the fifth Ray of Concrete Knowledge and Science and the fourth ray of Harmony Through Conflict, individual humans become integrated personalities, then soul-infused personalities making contact with Hierarchy and Christ at its centre, and eventually identify completely with the Monad. Jung’s outer life as a scientist and psychologist, and his inner-personal struggle was, “not to put a stop to the work of salvation but to put a stop to all the childish inflations so the real work of saving the world can continue unimpeded, undisturbed. It’s to begin to discover and then live with the truth… The real reason for dis-identifying from the archetypal energies is not so that we can be free from them but so that they can be free from us – free to move and work as they need in this physical world, assisted by our consciousness but uncontaminated by the unbecoming dramas of our human psychology”. [10]

Here, another ‘archetypal’ mystery revealed itself to Jung. Truth must remain invisible, go unrecognized in order to keep it pure and uncontaminated by the “I” that may attempt to recognize, seize or diminish it in any way. This is the secret that Jung kept sacred, kept hidden in the Red Book through his refusal to expose himself, and his purpose as ‘saviour of the world’, during his lifetime. It should be noted that during the Freeman interview (1959) Jung intimated that, what now forms the content of his Red Book, could be published after his death and in fact, meant for this to happen by addressing some entries to Dear Friends. By example, Jung demonstrated a “new harmony of mutual respect; the primordial state of divine awareness hidden away inside a human body without any of the grabbing or inflation or identification; the life in God.”[11] In my view, Jung’s ‘process of individuation’ was part of the greater unfoldment of consciousness – an Initiation he was impelled to undertake. By identifying with the deity of Christ, his deification brought him knowledge beyond any form of belief and gave him the power and influence he continues to exert in the world.

I pause to note the similarities and synchronicities I have observed between Carl Jung and Peter Kingsley, whose experiences are courageously exposed – at great expense no doubt – in his most recent book, Catafalque. The work of Kingsley’s lifetime seems to have reached a pivotal point of synthesis and assimilation, culminating in the writing of Catafalque, which is primarily about Jung, and to a lesser extent, the Sufi scholar, Henry Corbin. The importance of Henry Corbin to Jung cannot be overstated. Expressing the highest regard, Jung said that Corbin had given him “not only the rarest of experiences, but the unique experience of being completely understood”. [12]

Already I have said all that really needs to be said about Carl Jung and alluded to why I consider him to be a forerunner of the race. But there are other reasons as well. Perhaps a little more detail will help explain.

In the 1959 interview with John Freeman that Jung gave at the age of 84, Freeman, asked: “Do you remember the occasion when you first felt consciousness of your own individual self? Without hesitation, Jung immediately replied: “That was in my eleventh year. On my way to school I ‘stepped out of the mist.’ It was just as if I had been in a mist, walking in a mist, and I stepped out of it and I knew I Am, I Am what I Am. And then I thought, but what have I been before, and then I found that I had been in a mist”. (Jung was unable to recall any precipitating event). [13]

It was during this interview that Jung revealed, perhaps, his more prophetic nature. He believed a third world war was likely, but that it was difficult to interpret dreams as indications as to what one sees because, “we are so full of apprehensions and fears we don't know exactly to what it points… There are these peculiar faculties of the psyche that it isn’t entirely confined to space and time. You can have dreams or visions of the future. You can see around corners. These facts show that the psyche, in part at least, is not dependent upon these confinements; and then what? When the psyche is not under that obligation to live in time and space alone, and obviously it doesn’t, then to that extent the psyche is not subject to those rules and that means a practical continuation of life, of a sort of psychical existence beyond time and space”. [14]

Jung went on to state something well worth noting in light of the two volumes of Esoteric Psychology written by the Tibetan and Alice Bailey. "One thing is sure. A great change of our psychological attitude is immanent. That is certain… We need more understanding of psychology, of human nature because the only real danger that exists is man himself. He is the great danger and we are pitifully unaware of it. We know nothing of man; far too little. His psyche should be studied because we are the origin of all coming evil." [15]

As with all visionaries, Gnostics or prophets, Jung bore the cross of suffering on behalf of humanity for the divine truths directly revealed and known to him. When asked about his beliefs in the Freeman interview, Jung replied ‘he only knew things based on his experience of directly seeing what truly is and accepting that as fact’. “The word belief is a difficult thing for me. I don’t believe. I know a thing and if I know it I don’t need to believe it.”[16]

It was out of Jung’s dedicated research involving self-experimentation that the most essential aspect of his psychology, the process of individuation, emerged. Jung considered the ‘collective western cult of the individual’ as that which was most dangerous and destructive to the alchemical workings of the process of individuation, whereby we must allow ourselves to ‘die before we die’, are mysteriously transformed and then surrender what is left to the impersonal. Jungian psychology is fundamentally “a psychology that purports to offer to all a more or less clear map of the territory of individuation”.[17] It is a path to becoming god, a path to deification, a path of being ‘allowed to act humbly and without pretension as a servant’ to humanity’s spirit through the only access we have, the human psyche. ‘It was this inner world in which Jung lived and had his being.’[18] Individuation is a lonely and solitary process; one Jung warns requires heroic courage because the mystery of individuation is the mystery of the Grail.[19]

There is a record of letters exchanged between Jung and an Englishman in what was to be Jung’s last winter. Jung speaks of the darkness he found himself immersed in, the difficulty of the task and the aloneness he felt. The Englishman replied: “To me, personally, nothing could be clearer than the reference in the Gospel of John to the light which ‘shineth in the darkness, and the darkness comprehendeth it not’… Right from the start you were shaped out of the stuff heroes are made of; you have a heroic destiny, a heroic burden heavily weighing on your shoulders. And just as the human Jesus had to die on the cross to bring light to other humans, it’s the same with you. But please forgive me for even suggesting this comparison”.[20] Jung replied: “Your Biblical analogies are perfectly legitimate, as they are archetypic experience, which are repeated again and again, whenever a new idea is born, or when a hero- child appears in the world. Time and again, a light tries to pierce the darkness”… going on to admit just how naïve he was “in not expecting the darkness to be so dense.” [21]

 Jung described his role as being to shift our collective focus away from the “idea of the historical Christ” towards the reality of Christ as an “immediate and living presence”.[22] Jung discovered, through his own initiation, it is Christ who initiates. As the Red Book reveals, the numinous was Jung’s motivation for undergoing the solitary, immensely painful and often terrifying process of individuation as a conscious sacrifice of the personal self in order to experience God.[23] Jung was always looking past the personal to the impersonal, looking for the archetype beyond any individual expression of it.

For me, parallels between the teachings of the Tibetan and the insights, revelations and realizations Jung gained through direct experience could not be clearer. Where a mist still lingers, there is more to help clear the air. When spoken about in relation to Jung, the numinous is the lived experience of a sacred or divine presence, beyond any attempt to capture or describe it in language. The numinous manifests through paradox and seeming contradictions; through visions, dreams, fantasies and synchronicities that reveal the unlikely, the irrational and even the impossible. The numinous, by nature, is elusive and as graspable as water. It is not at all personal, has nothing to do with self-fulfillment, but rather it is an impulse that pulls one towards the divine self. Any attempt at harnessing the numinous for oneself is as futile as trying to catch the wind. Only when it is free to move and flow can its aliveness be experienced and known. There is nothing to understand. There is no one to understand. There is only life completing its own circle.

“To Jung, there could never be any escaping the fact that we are tools of the numinous whose only hope is to become conscious tools and wise ones”.[24] Jung knew, above all, that when it came to the overwhelming experiences with the sacred he encountered via the archetypes, he was undergoing the individuation process of deification. Jung described himself as the mystical fool in following the numinous because he so much “wanted God to be alive and free from the suffering man has put in him, by loving his own reason more than God’s secret intentions”.[25] Very early on, Jung had realized that, “the decisive question for every person is: Is that individual knowingly, ‘related to something infinite or not?’ ... His fundamental concern was with the soul of humanity… It was with the most burdensome, but numinous, of undertakings that makes one consciously feel, and often have to carry the whole weight of humanity’s problems on one’s shoulders. This isn’t just a job. It’s a supreme responsibility: a divine responsibility; a sacred task”. [26]

Here I could not but recognize how this relates to the task of the New Group of World Servers in general and that of its members who choose to undertake the sacrificial path of the spiritual warrior, accelerating a ‘triple expansion of consciousness’ through the unfolding of consciousness in a process the Tibetan refers to as: individualization, initiation and identification.[27]

Jung not only had concerns with regard to the divine task set before him, but before humanity. He was deeply worried about where science and western civilization was headed. In The Red Book, “Jung begs his soul to protect him from science and keep him far away from the bondage of its cleverness… and its poison in spite of its advantages.”[28] There was once a time when science, philosophy, prophecy and healing were related. The ancient Greek word, physikos, was the origin or source of the modern words: Physicist-Scientist; Physician-Healer (ancient Greek Iatromantis Prophet-Healer) and Alchemist – the prototypal scientists we call magicians.[29]

Jung, physician, healer, scientist and philosopher, emphasized direct seeing and immediate experience, not thinking and theorizing or distinguishing science from mysticism. For Jung, true science arose out of inner, mystical experiences. There was no separating the two. Jung stated that his whole science derived entirely from his ‘visions and dreams’,[30] but “the petty, reasoning mind… cannot endure any paradoxes”.[31] Only a few months before his death, Jung confided in a Native American elder who saw the light of the world at the final edge of being extinguished by western rationalism. Jung sided with him saying that in his old age all he could do was privately guard his own light and treasure because “it is most precious not only to me, but above all to the darkness of the creator”.[32] “I am not afraid of communism; I am afraid of unconsciousness and of modern science… The atom bomb is in the hands of unconscious people. It is like giving a baby a kilo of gelignite, it eventually blows itself up”. [33]

The work of the scientist can be esoterically understood as an instinctive tendency towards the unfolding process of expansion to rediscover our sacred roots within the primordial mysteries. All fields of modern science are aspects of the science of the Ageless Wisdom. Occultists refer to occultism or esotericism as the science of hidden energies. The occultist does not recognize substance but rather consciousness as an aspect of Spirit, the intelligent, creative energy of Life that gives structure and form to Matter. Jung, the esoteric scientist, discovered that the primordial numinous could only be discovered inside oneself. Intellectual reasoning or reading could but “lend a helping and reassuring hand, offer a few timely echoes, give a bit of extra substance and form to what one already mysteriously knows, add some firmer outlines to the affiliations and lineages vaguely intuited inside.”[34] For Jung, the esoteric psychologist, nothing is possible without plunging back into the past in search of the secret at the heart of one’s own culture. He understood his task was cultural and that, “the core of his task was to rediscover the essential mystery of the West that so urgently needs to be treasured and guarded, protected and preserved, because only this can provide salvation.”[35]

Belonging to no culture, the ancient Mysteries of the Ageless Wisdom live through all cultures. It follows they must be remembered and contacted through culture. Eastern religions and other traditions have generally maintained their spiritualism through their continuity of culture, however Western spirituality, for the most part, has borrowed heavily from the mystical traditions and rituals of other cultures, attempting to adopt and modify them as their own. The same approach has been taken towards the more exotic, shamanic cultures that exist among Native Americans, Australian Aboriginals, New Zealand Maoris, Mongolian herders, Tibetan Buddhists, and African tribes, to mention but a few I am fairly well acquainted with.

The problem for Westerners amidst the glamour of rampant materialism and religions that preach the dogma of a particular ‘brand of church’, interpreting a central, sacred text (e.g. the Bible or Koran) in the name of God, is that many sensitive and sincere people, particularly the young, have turned to the East, turned to drugs, “turned anywhere to fill the terrible emptiness of meaning they have been brought up in. And the kind of nourishment they find in eastern spiritual teachings or teachers can help to a significant extent to provide what they, as individuals need”.[36] This is the danger Jung foresaw in the collective unconscious of Western civilization, where unconscious individuals consciously seek and attempt to imitate the spiritual traditions and rituals of other cultures devoid of their sacred origins in time and place, the cultural source of the numinous that gives them their meaning, significance and power. Jung clearly stated, “That is a danger about which it is impossible to give too many warnings”. [37]

Miraculously, amidst the poverty of remembrance of Western civilization’s own heritage of spiritual culture, in a civilization that worships money and materialism above God, in spite of the visible chaos and confusion within and among the churches, it seems ‘we the people’ of the collective West are looking for, trying to regain, something we only sense has been lost or forgotten. We must reach into the depths of our own soil, the ground of our cultural tree to restore and resurrect the roots of Western civilization, performing our sacred task in helping the West regain its rightful place at the table of the Mysteries, among other cultures where the ancestors of the race are seated.

“Gnosis should be an experience of your own life. A plant grown on your own tree. Foreign gods are a sweet poison but the vegetable gods you have raised in your own garden are nourishing. They are perhaps less beautiful, but they have stronger medicine.” [38]

As a forerunner of the race, and perhaps a prophet wearing the cloak of a scientist and psychologist for the sake of the Spirit Of The Times, the Spirit Of The Depths that lived through Carl Jung continues to shine, lighting the way for the souls who tread the path of darkness. May Jung’s life of service continue to inspire and remind us that we too are spiritual suns. Following his example, may we reach inside to find the light and bring it out to meet the need, remembering the light of true wisdom “only shines in the dark.”[39]