Bernardo Kastrup "Jung's Crown Jewel"

uh so you were born in Brazil and you started you you you you you discovered yung in a Bookshop in in a German Bookshop right yeah I was a kid how old how old were you then approximately 12 13 right no no it was before my father died so I was maximum 12 all right do you remember do you remember what struck your in that forward to the iing why just uh no I I I was a kid it's hard to really recover that mindset and put myself back there but my memory is that um when I picked up that book and I looked at it the eing and my first reaction ction to it was that ah it's some some some you know esoteric uh um fiction or fantasy not something to take seriously um there were lots of you know funny figures in the book you know which I Now understand what they were but when I was a kid I was like what is this some kind of Oracle um and for some reason I started reading the first paragraphs of of the forward um by Jung M and what struck me is that he wrote as a rationalist a very intuitive rationalist but a rationalist nonetheless and um and the way he talked about that book sort of opened up space for a rational relationship with the book that nonetheless took the book seriously that didn't dismiss the book on so he he made me see that there were rational hypothesis on the basis of which we could contemplate uh what is essentially an oracle u in a serious way as a hypothesis that may hold some water you know it's highly speculative but it's not nonsense it's not completely debased uh and that's what struck me um that Yung managed to open that door in my mind that there was was more that was a meable to rational interpretation than I initially thought right and then you you were mostly in computers and I I'd really like to that would be very I mean we we we have an hour so we can't go into great detail but your your trajectory from the computer science and then back to Yung that's we have readers with a rather technocratic uh mindset so that could uh help help to establish your credentials there well I went to computer engineering school I was I had just turned 17 years old and um you know I I grew up in the early days of the home computer Revolution um and I I touched my first home computer I was like 60 years old it was a zx81 or yeah I was two six years old I think and um and I I thought those things were wonderful and I and I wanted to build my own my own thepoke home computer and so I went to computer univers computer engineering school at University I was just 17 um and then you know as soon as I graduated I landed at CERN in Switzerland working with the big accelerator I was part of the data acquisition team of the atlas experiment which is part of the large hard collider one of the two big experiments that have discovered the he bosen about 10 years ago um and and all that side of me that had to do with Yung had to do with this sort of edifying speculations about the nature of mind and then the nature of reality all of that took a back seat from the time I was 17 into the the beginning of my career because I was in a sort of a professional Whirlwind I love what I did um if you don't mind me saying that I was good at what I was good at what I did even though I was very young um but then at CERN although we were building data acquisition systems based on classical algorithms based on a human understanding of the physics um in parallel we were doing in our own time uh um an alternative an an equivalent data acquisition system based on artificial neuronal Networks so Ai and uh although it was not adopted because you know back in the '90s neuron networks were still sort of a black box they they worked but nobody understood quite what they were doing or why they worked so people didn't trust them and they were not powerful enough so it was never used but um in our own experiments we realized that a neuro network is just as good as the classical algorithm that's based on human intelligence human understanding and then the question came to me you know if I can make a computer that is as intelligent as a physicist what does it take to make it conscious mhm and I struggled with that question for a couple of years until I realized that whatever I would change in my design whatever I conceivably could change in my design it would have an impact only on structure and function and it would bring me no closer or no further from having a reason to consider it conscious in other words none of what I did had any bearing on Consciousness it it was completely unrelated incommensurable and how could that be no that realization forced me to re-evaluate my metaphysics my my view of the nature of reality the nature of Mind retrace my steps um in order to figure out when I took a wrong turn that brought me to a dead alley and I realized that that wrong turn was the assumption that I never examined that Consciousness is something that you can create out of specific material Arrangements um one thing is incommensurable with the other so that assumption was wrong so I thought okay what does it take then to not make that assumption and still have a rational narrative in terms of which to relates to the world and that eventually brought me to metaphysical idealism and brought me back to Yung uh brought me back to philosophy which I was very interested in when I when I was a kid um and eventually brought me to a second doctorate at this time in philosophy and now what 12 books written in philosophy countless papers and essays so yeah it's been a big turn yeah when was that uh when you when you realized that you have to reevaluate this basic metaphysical assumption it was in the early ughs so between 2000 and 2005 it it wasn't one big moment uh it um it sort of spread out in time um I started being suspicious of it at the turn of the century but I realized it conclusively after 2005 yeah was there any specific event there which no no it was not there wasn't that seminal moment um it's something not a revelation or anything it's just like a well it was a revelation but anous not a stantaneous one it's something that sort of cooked up in the back of my mind for the longest time and eventually percolated up to my normal awareness right but by the time it did that it was very solid it was a very solid very reliable uh Insight quite opposite to the uh to The Ether of our time when everybody's talking about AE and now is how it is becoming conscious if not tomorrow than there after well I guess every period in history has its idiocy and this is the idiocy of the time all right well let's switch to to Jung then I I like very much uh the the metap for that you came up uh with a few of interviews and in the perhaps not in the book but Jung as as a candle holder uh in this dark dark period of positivism and and uh behaviorism yeah so like like a link from German idealism to the current shall we say the Western Renaissance in metaphysics yeah yeah he was very lonely doing that yeah just um let let's take first this longer longer view of history and put Jung into that slot where where he belongs and on that great grand scheme well before the middle of the 19th C Century we have always had a relationship with the world that um entailed the understanding that behind the things we saw behind the physical stuff of the world there was something similar or akin to what is behind our own body in other words Consciousness um who chronicled this best was probably um I forgot the name of the author the book is saving the appearances how can I draw a blank now uh I try to remember I saving the appearance is a phrase that belongs to Plato isn't it I mean no it's the title of there not not the book by play but uh no it is a philosopher from the 20th century how can I forget his name my goodness me but the phrase I think belongs to BL doesn't it it could be yeah but yeah but so there was a philosopher who wrote this book saving the appearances in the middle of the 20th century and and and that's the point he makes that U behind the appearances of the world we have always considered there to be something equivalent to ourselves in other words a Consciousness behind the appearances so as there is a Consciousness behind this physical body me there is a Consciousness behind the physical universe that was how we related to reality sort of automatically instinctively for the longest of times um even after the enlightenment the founders of the Enlightenment knew that materialism was just a weapon to be used against the church for political and power reasons it was not a proper metaphysics um Den did his own record saying materialism doesn't really work but we need it as a weapon against the church he said that I think in the 18th century it was only around the middle of the 19th century when um hegelian idealism um no longer was mainstream in Europe it lost its traction um hegelianism became sort of transmuted into Marxism around that time um and then there was um um you know on the origin of the spe species by Darin which robbed religion out of its very last power which is the power to create life um we then we forgot that materialism was was a a political tool and we started actually believing wholesale that mind doesn't either doesn't exist or or doesn't matter and by the early 20th century we had logical positivism the the incredibly naive and fallacious notion that only the things you can perceive exist it's like what why would a monkey have evolved the perceptual apparatus that is able to capture every Salient aspect of nature there's absolutely no reason why we would have evolved to do that we evolved to survive not to have a complete understanding of the cosmos and nature and all its sances uh and then behaviorism which basically eliminated Consciousness mind from scientific from the scientific dialogue it basically said mind mind only exists in so far as its visible Behavior it tries to reduce mind to Its Behavior Uh which is ridiculous for there to be Behavior something needs to behave something needs to have the impetus uh the the the motivation for the behavior and we all know our own minds from within we know that we are minded even when we lie inert without moving without behaving we know that there is still mental inner life so how we fell into that black hole of downright stupidity it is it is it is it's unfathomable and Yung held the candle during the first half of the 20th century by insisting on what hung hungan psychologists today call the reality of the psyche and his point to Modern years to contemporary years now to to you and me U is incredibly self-evident it's a thology why doesn't even why did he need to say that because what he said was that experience is a real natural event experience is not nothing even when experiences are illusory they don't corespond to outside facts even then the fact that you have an illusion is an event in nature know it's not the same as not having the illusion have the illusion itself is real as such as an illusion um and that's the reality of the psyche mental events are real as such as mental events and that's like obvious and know who would question that but yes in those dark times of behaviorism people actually somehow somehow questioned that um the mind was dismissed as a sort of non-existent um those were those were very dark times and Yung H held the Kindle uh of light all the way until the beginning of a sort of a counter Revolution that would bring us to where we are today in which we openly debate P psychism we openly debate idealism we openly acknowledge the hard problem of Consciousness uh that is entailed by by materialism and that began in the 60s Yung died in 61 right yeah 6 61 um that began with the hippies of our things with the psychelic revolution that started in the 50s but no acquired Steam and momentum in the 60s um eventually would lead to a 1974 paper called what is it like to be a bat which brought back Consciousness experience into the scientific debate and then in the '90s the whole discussion about psychism which I think is wrong but it was good that we debated that uh to where we are today which is now idealism is pro some form of idealism is probably the only plausible alternative we have based on the experiments in physics that won the Nobel Prize last year which refuted physical realism unless one entertains some ridiculous philos um theoretical fantasy uh the entire discussion in analytic philosophy that basically renders physicalism untenable people who still rigorously defend physicalism today if you talk to them you realize that what they call physicalism is not materialism at all it's some something else that they still want to put the label physicalism on but it's more akin to a form of idealism or pens psychism or Cosmos psychism than it is to to materialism so materialism is is history and and Yung held the light during the most the most difficult dangerous and narrow segment of the path that has brought us here yeah one thing that I that I picked up from your book is that well many things obviously but how how tight a rope he was uh he he was U threading on yeah in his correspondence with paie and that was really really fascinating for for for me um all right um there one sentence that I wrote out and which I I ask you to to unpack uh causality is to synchronicity as Newtonian physics is to quantum physics This was um I think uh that leads us into the topic that is the the key the key to the for for this hour I think well that arose from the years of discussion that Yung had with Paulie and both in person and Via correspondence um Paulie went to Yung for because he had know psychological difficulties that he had to deal with but um also because strange things happened around him things that today we would call synchronicity but Jung hadn't published his book on synchronicity to at that at that moment so Paulie and Jung were talking about this and Paulie um told Jung that although causality rules in the classical world of tables and chairs if you zoom into the microscopic into the quantum world causality no longer rules because individual Quantum events seem to be random we can't predict individual Quantum events and of course everything in nature arises from Individual Quantum events um and then Yung had this hypothesis that maybe the there are two organizing principles in nature one is causality that applies to tables and chairs and the other one is synchronicity that applies directly to the microscopic to the quantum world and what is synchronicity synchronicity is a principle of organization in nature that operates by similarity similar things tend to happen together that similarity doesn't need to be a similarity of appearance it's rather a similarity of meaning symbolic meaning denotation connotation um and so causality operates through cause leading to effects and synchronicity operates through the correspondences of meaning and they would be orogo in hung's hypothesis um and what would open space for synchronicity would be you know the seemingly random Quantum level events but of course after Yung and paully flashed these hypothesis out they because they were honest and reasonable thinkers they realized that um you know this classical world of causality this world of tables and chairs it is actually a Quantum world every macroscopic causal event is just the aggregation of myriad microscopic Quantum events so causality cannot be ortogonal to synchronicity causality has to be the aggregate result of many synchronicities happening together such that statistically you can model it in the form of causality but if the quantum level is synchronistic then the tables and chairs are also synchronistic but they are synchronistic in a statistical aggregate way um that leads to these higher level patterns and regularities we call cause and effect but cause and effect should be ultimately reducible go to synchronicities to correspondences of meaning to cor to to similarity as opposed to causality and how exactly that happened of course they couldn't flash it out we we haven't flashed it out to this day we don't know how you know the world of superposed uh uh Quantum possibilities becomes this definite classical world of tables and chairs to this day we don't know that we know that there is something related to to to decoherence going on but even the coherence doesn't really explain this transition um so they just raised this hypothesis that you know what we call cality is just a statistical aggregate of many many many synchronistic events at a microscopic level so in that sense Newtonian mechanics Newtonian physics is also the the statistical aggregate of many many many Quantum events and that's why the statement in the book uh um that uh uh synchronicity is the fundamental reality and the classical world of cause and effect is just a sort of epip phenomenon of synchronicity sort of an emergent statistical property of synchronicity just like temperature is an emergent statistical property of the movement of molecules so in that in that way right um the the the name of sheld already came up in our today's discussion and uh I mean he's he's been uh Guiding Light for me in the last uh let's say three four four five years perhaps even how how would you see his theory in of of mosic resonance in against the background of yungan metaphysics he has himself said that he he kind of expands the uh yungan notion of unconscious and archetypes to the whole to the whole to the whole nature so would be very would be what's what you have to say on that one I would M maintain that Yung already did it himself um in his Corpus exactly very clear that for Yung what we call the external physical world is just the perceptual manifestation of the collective unconscious so the collective unconscious is not only within us really deep inside but it surrounds us at the same time in the form that we call the physical world so if the unconscious if the activity or the behavior of the unconscious unfolds according to this templates that we call archetypes um then the physical world is also the embodiment uh of these archetypes the expression of these archetypes and that's why there are synchronicities a correspondence between an inner psychic event and an outer physical event that happens because both the inner psych and the outer world are both the ultimately the collective unconscious expressing itself uh so that that that notion was already present in Yung uh Robert takes this further um it's not only the original archetypes that were there from the get-go which are part of what nature is is they are properties fundamental intrinsic properties of nature not only do those fundamental original templates Express themselves in the world but the way we give expression to them and sort of modify them or clothe them with our own peculiarities even those habits that we create over time tend to perpetuate themselves um a a habit created in the past will bias the probabilities of which events happen today events that are consistent with the previous habit will tend to happen with higher probability than events that are not consistent with previous habits as we are creating archetypes as we go is that is that well I wouldn't call them archetypes because the word ethologically already refers to something that is intrinsic and and immutable okay um but we create habits oh yeah and habits have a certain momentum a certain inertia once they are setting motion sort of opens a path that nature would tend to use after afterwards and that's Rupert's theory of morphic resonance that habits would tend to bias Nature's future Behavior Uh along the lines of those habits and that's why they are habits because it tend to stick to them um under physicalism um this is difficult to to couch in in a formal theoretical uh way because under physicalism the only regularities of Nature's Behavior are those that are uh self-consistent in other words for instance take gravity if you take a book and then in your hand and then you release it it will always fall down it will never fall up uh it is this consistency that allows us to talk of the laws of nature uh but when it comes to Habits by definition you don't have that consistency what you have is a statistical bias but to verify that statistical bias you have to make so many measurements under so many different circumstances outside the laboratorium the laboratory that uh it is it is not in practice possible to verify those habits under know traditional scientific methods under idealism however in which the whole world is the expression of mind that the physical world is just how the behavior of Mind presents itself to our observation because of the peculiarities of our perceptual apparatus if that's how we understand nature then that nature has habits is incredibly intuitive we are mind Ed entities and we have habits we have direct insight into how mind attaches itself to habits how mind has that inherent disposition to stick to a habit because it makes things easier uh it makes things more comfortable it makes us feel reassured um we have direct psychological insight into that so we we don't need really really formal OB objective evidence to entertain the hypothesis seriously under idealism the hypothesis is almost natural mind tends to create habits if nature is a mind then it will tend to stick to habits right I mean I how would per fit into that bigger picture that we uh we just uh um just what's your take on bone well um since we were talking about rert you are probably alluding to um mind and matter mind and matter and the Creative Evolution first yeah that's that's that book the first one mind and matter is one of Robert's greatest influences I think I think he talked about that in public uh at some point yeah and the Creative Evolution yeah B in general yes as far as I understand Bon was to a large extent an empiricist uh in the vein of um B Bishop Barkley um he would say you know what is the world as far as I can know it it's a collection of images um and and what is my body well it's also an image when he talks about image what he's talking about is mental contents the world is a set of images my perceptions the colors I see the smells I feel the textures I feel the The Melodies I hear these are mental events they are experiences they are made of qualities they're not abstract quantities there is something it is like to see the redness of an apple to taste a strawberry or to feel the bitterness of of a heartbreak these are the images that constitute the world as we know it and we are also images images in the mirror images when you look down but our image is privileged in a certain sense because the disposition of my image modulates all the other images in other words if I turn my head and look back the other images change I see what is behind me as opposed to what is in front of me so we seem to be a privileged image in a world of images in other words a mental content in a world of mental contents and that's entirely um compatible and consistent um with idealism uh what I think Bon doesn't do is to account for why the images in your world are consistent with the images in my world if you were here in my study you would describe my study in a way very consistent with my own description of it so there there obviously are well obviously goes too far because there is there are serious people in physics today who say that this is not obvious at all but there seems to be a world Beyond ourselves in other words there seem to be a set of states that are not part of our own perceptions they are states out there they would still be there if you were not around they do not change just because we wish them to be different so even though all I can perceive is a a collection of my own images my own perceptions of the world and you your collection of your own images your own perceptions because your images are consistent with mine it seems to be the case that both your images and my images are calibrated by an external set of states in which you and I are immersed what is that set what is the nature of that set how does the modulation take place how can we learn something about that set that set is what C called the Numa as opposed to the phenomenal um so all these questions um need a a rigorous analytic answer that uh beon um I don't think even attempted um to provide it um in the form that would be expected today with conceptual Clarity uh uh logical rigor um empirical Co adequacy all this stuff that we talk about today it was not the language of his time in the late 19th and very early 20th century so he didn't do that so we can't go as far as to say bar son was an idealist I don't think he had a system uh that was complete to any degree um to the degree that would be needed for us to use that word for him but his thinking is seminal for modern idealism that is for sure um the the word images came up and just it reminded me uh in one of your in one of your uh interviews you mentioned the name of James Hilman who has been has had a profound impact on on on My Views since well yeah i' I've said that like five years ago uh I could have summed up my philosophical and psychological insight in one in in one sentence that on the 7th of November you have to go to the parade and that's it that's that's the sort of upshot from my education from the from the Soviet times that's that's the that was the executive summary of my education in in pychology and philosophy so after that Hilman has really been a great great influence and it there is a seven uh I don't know if if you have heard of it it's like a seven-hour seminar on YouTube on on on Yung that he that I um make extensive note on notes on and I just read from here that related this is related to the images that image is psyche Yung Central position says Hilman image is psyche soul is not only expressed in images but exists in them how would you how would you uh I I've written it down it sounded important I'm not quite sure that I like to I'd like to unpack it with with your help uh we can try to unpack it historically um the notion of the imagination as free and fundamental um goes back almost say everything to to the Hindu Valley to India Pakistan um and and the original uh vedantic uh philosophy so everything can be traced back to that uh but in more modern times in the beginning of Islam particularly Shiite uh Islam um they developed what is probably the most criminally underrated philosophy in the history of the world which is the philosophy of the imagination you see that expressed in Sufism but um even outside of Sufism M Shiite Isam Islam is um is characterized in its beginning by this idea that all the world and image which is the title of a book uh by cheatem um which is about the philosophy of the imagination um Yung was big on this the notion that the psyche's fundamental expression is in the the form of images and when he says images he doesn't mean only visual images he's appealing to the imagination in general our ability to form images not only that are visual but also other types of sensoria and and even feelings and emotions states that can be imagined brought into existence through the endogenous activity of mind um human he met Yung late in yung's life humanman was much younger than Yung we know he met Jung three or four times he was a student at The Institute when Yung was still alive even though he was not participating much uh in The Institute anymore and he run with this notion of the the the the key expression of the psyche being in the form of images of imagination and he poeticized it which is a fair move because when again when we are talking about images we don't talk only about visual images we talk about the entire emotional loading that is associated with the image and and and all the insights and evocations of meaning that accompany those images and um and humans archetypal psychology is basically a psychology of the imagination which sort of links back all the way to early Shi Islam uh which is Islam which is which is amazing how how these things pop again and again in different times in different cultures I would still consider Shiite Shiite Islam as the holders um the the the not only caretakers they're more than that but U the root of that tree if you know the ones who are still nurturing it to this day even though they're not talked about much which I think is Criminal but that's how it is um Yung may be tried to be more scientific in this position during his time human didn't have that he he he got his PhD from from the University of the uh which is you know it's it's not a bad place to get a PhD from he got it even sumak Kung lder I think yeah he did he he he got it sumak lder because of his book on what was it emotions I think yeah which was just before his book on suicide yeah um suicide yeah so he he poeticized the whole of life he was basically you know he he tried to provide a counterbalance to this cynical uh scientistic not scientific but scientistic view of nature that we have today um which says that nature is something that is dead it is intrinsically devoid of meaning and meaning is an illusion that we project on nature human he tried to shift the pendulum radically to The Other Extreme in the hope that the pendulum would stop somewhere in the middle so his extreme was life is poetic life is the unfolding of a meaning Rich story um and that story is expressed in the form of images not mathematical equations not dead stuff obeying rules as if it were a mechanism no that's not it that's not the world that's not nature that's not life life is is the unfolding of their poetic imagination and it's a book to be read to be interpreted it's a book to be allowed to touch you deep within to to convey emotion to you to evoke emotion out of you that's what it is about and everything else is just a story it's just Theory it's just abstraction it's not real um what is real is the poetic imagination that's life that's what it's all about now of course truth is probably somewhere in the middle of these two things because there are things about the world that are so incredibly predictable that it's hard to say they are not mechanical the world doesn't seem to have the total of Freedom we associate with the poetic imagination but does it have a lot of poetic imagination in it of course it does one would need to be blind or very prejudiced to deny it right well uh you're approaching the the the last quarter of our hour of our our hour let's complete your your questions so if I have to stay a little longer it's okay okay thank you thanks so much um the crown sh of the of the yung's Legacy I like that uh I like that that sentence as well uh let's uh jump into that now the last chapters were just I mean I I I thoroughly enjoy the book it's just uh pulled so many the clarity and uh and uh I think that's the yeah the clarity and that was very very helpful because Yung it's it's easy to get lost in yeah that that is that is true well you know I I think different people have different opinions about what is the crown jewel of yung's Legacy I think Yung himself had an opinion about it that I I suspect is not far from my own my opinion is that his his crown jewel is a small little book very easy to dismiss called answer to job which is a sort of a psychological analysis of both both the Book of Job in the Old Testament and the New Testament and how God seems to undergo an an amazing transformation between those two books in the Old Testament um God makes a bet with Satan who is not in Hell Satan is just a member of the Entourage of God Satan is basically the prosecutor in the court of God he's not a sadist he's not a bad guy he's the dalter uh he he is the guy who puts a mirror in front of you whom you when you're all you know filled with self-righteousness and the devil is the guy who comes puts a mirror in front of you and say look you are guilty of all this crap that you're accusing others of self-righteously and that's why we hate the devil and that's why we exiled the devil in hell because we don't want to be confronted with our own Dark Side our own contradictions our own inability to see the bad in in ourselves and our disposition to be judgmental of others that's why we Exile the devil but in the Old Testament the devil is not in Exile yet and God makes a bet with the devil um to see whether the devil can prove that job a righteous man very faithful um actually did all the good he did just to be on the good side of God and and get rich um and and God thinks no he's just righteous and the devil says no he's doing that out of self-interest in other words he's a neopan he's he is you know trying to be on your good side because then he has all those sheep and all those healthy kids that he has and then the devil proceeds Satan proceeds to torture job over the longest of times even though job did nothing wrong and job confronts god with it and says I'm a righteous man I did nothing wrong why are you inflicting all this punish punishment on me my children have died I don't have my my my sheep anymore um you know I'm not healthy anymore I'm poor you know it's tragedy after tragedy why do I deserve this and once he confront God God goes and a tiate saying you know I am the power behind the storms and he he doesn't actually answer the question he just goes on a tiate and in that book J Jung basically analyzes Yahweh the J the the god of the Old Testament and says he was incapable of self reflection as Jung put it he was omniscient but he didn't know how to consult his omniscience the devil did in in any by any measure better than God uh did um and therefore there is a sense in which in yung's analysis God sinned against job and to redeem that in the New Testament job enters his own creation in the form of a man of Jesus and suffers like a man does like job did and becomes the sum bonum the total good in other words God becomes more conscious more individuated in in hungan terminology of course this is all metaphorical talk um using the metaphors of scripture but um the for me the Jew in Yung Legacy is one paragraph in answer to job when he says I will paraphrase it I can't quote exactly um moreover it was not written in English but um he says something to this effect perhaps this is what man can contribute to God the word man here is sexist but I will stick to his style of back in the 50s what man can contribute to God is that man is small in front of the monstrousness of the world so he regularly is stopped on his feet because of his weakness and he's forced to contemplate himself to and contemplate the world and ask the deeper questions and become self-reflective and metac conscious to for instance Ponder the implications of his actions or the actions of nature the the actions of God the actions of the world and think through them deeply and God doesn't need to do any of this because God is the almighty he has never stopped on his tracks and forced to self-reflect forc to contemplate what's going on so man is what enables the self-reflectiveness of God it is through Man's eyes that God becomes more conscious more self-aware um and and this in religious met metaphor of course this one paragraph singlehandedly restores meaning to human life because now we are no longer rats in the cruel and pointless experiment by the Divinity um which would be the case if God had all the answers if God already knew everything was completely conscious why do we need to suffer he already has all the answers why does he need us to learn something what is this test that we are put through here like kids in a school the teacher already knows all the answers and we are put in this just to suffer for no reason it's a kind of sadistic game that has no meaning but instead of thinking our of ourselves as kids in school think of ourselves as scientists in a lab in laborat who are performing Leading Edge research to learn things that God himself still doesn't know and we have been deputized by God to help God become more conscious now suddenly all this suffering is couched in meaning yes it's bad will always be bad but it is a tool towards insight and the insights that we accumulate during our lives because we suffer are granted as gifts to God himself uh once we die um so one paragraph singlehandedly restores meaning to life without departing from the Christian narrative and the Christian metaphors I think that was astounding and astonishing feat of the human intellect a gigantic step almost almost superhuman in that sense he equates also as I understand equat god with a collective unconscious is that the is that you how you well whatever answer I give you now there will be Union Scholars that will dispute it and it comes back to that old uh uh discussion in Yan psychology what's the difference between God and the god image yeah did Jung talk about only the god image or did he talk about God himself I I think towards the end of of his life Yung made clear that he was talking about God himself not only the god image in the human psyche because an image must be imprinted by something God is that something that imprints the god image in our psyche uh so I think he did see God as the Fountain Head of the collective unconscious as that which expresses itself as the collective unconscious and which appears to us as the colloquially physical uh world yeah yeah and he saw us essentially as diamonds of the collective unconscious he he talks about diamonds as semi-independent psychic complexes um and he never says we are diamonds too but he comes so close to saying that that you can smell that he intentionally implied it and he wanted you as reader to be critical enough to understand that that's what he meant so if we are diamonds of the collective unconscious that cease to be diamonds after we die then our insights are again dispersed into the collective unconscious and that's the mechanism for men's service to God is to suffer through life in order to self-reflect and think because if we don't suffer we don't think about the bigger questions we just are busy with having fun but if we suffer we stop to think we we accumulate and develop evolve insights during our lives and those insights are are offering to God at the moment of death um Jung suggests in multiple places including his biography uh memory dreams uh Reflections yeah all right perhaps time the last or about two last questions uh you didn't the term Shadow didn't come up in the in the book but uh but uh it did come up with many interviews that I watched and the uh and was almost almost always coupled with the notion of adolescent uh Western culture could you just U um put these things somehow kind of elaborate on these two two key terms Shadow and Adolescence of our Western culture we everyone always has a hidden s u we tend to favor the expression of certain ones of our own characteristics and repress the expression of others why do we make this Choice it may have to do with some intrinsic dispositions but it they also also may have to do with the culture in which we grow up the education we receive the values of the society in which we live so we we favor certain characteristics that we have and we allow them to express themselves and we repress others often um we emphasize characteristics that our culture considers good like our ability to to work hard our righteousness our you know our moral dispositions and then we repress what Society considers bad but which are equally part of us like um our disposition to be angry to inflict harm um to be dishonest to betray and all these things are archetypes they they in in in a higher or lower degree they are present in all of us even betrayal uh humanman wrote an entire book about betrayal um exactly at a bar a moment in his life when his wife had betrayed him and he was betraying his wife um so it was M very know very present in his mind at the time he wrote it um the shadow are these characteristics these dispositions that we truly have which we repress which we try to not manifest not even acknowledge to ourselves that we have them and that's incredibly dangerous because whatever we repress can now do its thing without adult supervision because what you repress you're no longer looking at you're no longer supervising you're no longer paying attention to you lock it behind the door and now that thing is free to go on a rampage it's free to grow to to simmer to become stronger and bittered um and one day it breaks out the door and comes out totally out of control and and you see that when you have you know a rightous person who goes arrives at work every day at the right time does all his tasks is a good father to his family and one day when he's 40 he picks up a rifle goes to shopping mall and kills 20 people what do you think that is that's a repressed shadow that uh was allowed to simmer without supervision without a chance to express itself in safe ways so the pressure can be taken out now it it has been sitting in a pressure cooker for years and one day it explodes and that's the danger um we are very immature in the way we relate to our shadow we think it's a a moral value to not understand evil literally exactly the the point Hilman makes yeah yeah we we we we politicians can go up to a stage and say full of Pride I cannot relates to evil that is nothing me I just don't understand that this is incredibly one immature and two dangerous because if you truly do not understand evil you are going to be a victim of evil and an instrument of it just like Hitler was just like Putin is being right now the greatest evil in the world today is incarnated in that one figure Putin um the m sure way to relate to the shadow side is through adult supervision the shadow has to be allowed some expression it has to have its time Under the Sun otherwise it simmers and builds up pressure and one day it will backfire it will come back to bite you um how do how can you express the shadow well no one you have to be acquainted with it you have to look in the mirror and be able to see it for instance uh I have a shadow of uh rage I can become very angry in traffic when people do something they shouldn't do uh I also can get very angry when things don't work as they should I get very angry at low quality stuff you know because I am an engineer too and when things don't work as they should and I know there was no reason for it other than to be cheap I get pretty angry um and I get angry in traffic and and you might say well this I how how can you even call this dark shadow things they small and inconsequential everybody has that well they are small and inconsequential because they are under adult supervision because I recognize their existence in me because I allow them to express themselves for instance I will punch a dust bag if I'm pre angry that um there is you know a phone that's not working as it should I go punch the dirt bag and and and I I feed that expression you may say oh something so small and inconsequential no I feed it because that's my opportunity to let it out in a completely safe way with adult supervision as opposed to getting out of my car and punching another driver in the face it's much better to punch the dust bag right um and to recognize that in oneself it's a badge of maturity even if our culture doesn't consider it to be a badge of honor I think it's critically important that we understand not only the evil in first and foremost the evil in us it's the only way to understand the evil in others is to First understand evil in a first person from a first person perspective directly the evil in us it's critical that we understand that and then that we try to extrapolate that and understand the evil in others to understand evil is not to agree with it is not to succumb to it it's precisely the contrary to understand evil is a safu against succumbing to it it's incredibly important to understand and be acquainted with the shadow we need to understand why criminals do what they do and the only way to understand that is to find the seed of that of that Evo in ourselves and some for some reason our culture has come to consider this shameful that you can understand someone else's Evil by looking at the seed of evil in yourself we we get spooked by it we think oh that person then can be evil too no it's precisely the contrary it's by understanding evil that you don't succumb to it and you don't become its tool we have to be able you know I'm very proud of understanding many forms of evil um there are a couple I still cannot understand but I don't consider it a badge of honor I'll be very honest with you I don't understand adults who feel sexual attraction to kids it it's a room in the Palace of mind I have tried to enter several time I I I I can't relate to it because for me it's the effect is precis the opposite you know if I'm frisky and I don't want to be think of a child and boom no it's gone it's but I'm not proud of not understanding that because clearly it's part of nature clearly people are born that way and Society has to safeguard its children from that not by blaming those people they are born that way but by making sure they can't inflict harm and it and to do that you have to understand it so I don't consider it a badge of honor that I can't relate to it I I hope that one day when I'm older and I've seen more of life and more of people I hope I will at least have some inkling of where that is coming from um yeah that's my answer thanks just perhaps a very last short last one um the afterward your book is written by James Hollis and you spoke very highly of him I heard the name for the first time in one of the in one of the interviews could you just uh few few few remarks on him I think that seems to be an important lead for for me and for our readers I think he is which objective to use he's the deepest living y he has the deepest in SES and he's probably one of the wisest men alive um Hollis is a wounded healer life has put him through unspeakable suffering um so he understands where people are he he he understands suffering he understands it very very very well and he has found the strength in himself to perform the alchemical transformation from suffering to Healing to turn suffering into the ability to heal especially men um who go through midlife crisis um he has a couple of semino books that speak to men during a midlife crisis sat which uh on uh I think it's Saturn Shadow or under the shadow of Saturn well you can just look up all all his books are good um and um I have enormous respect uh for him well uh I cannot thank you enough uh just for for this hour and uh you know I told you a little bit of my story at the beginning so

Channel: Edmund Burke'i Selts

Views: 13,543

Keywords: Bernardo Kastrup, idealism, Wasiwaska, Rupert Sheldrake, consciousness, metaphysics, Thomas Nagel, Carl Gustav Jung, Decoding Jung's Metaphysics, James Hillman, James Hollis

Id: gvN_1bF1-GM

Length: 62min 57sec (3777 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 18 2024