Confronting Evil: A Jungian Guide for Searching for Light in the Heart of Darkness

good afternoon and thank you very much for joining me I'm pleased to have this opportunity to share some of my thoughts about evil when it can be transformed when it can be prevented and how we should consider confronting it when neither of these possibilities are true we will also think about what the meaning of evil might be in our landscape of life in general and in the union individuation process in specifics let me also remind you that when we begin to study subjects like evil a lot of emotion and history can be stirred up so I'm going to ask you to remember that I am sharing a point of view that I hope will stimulate and challenge you but I'm not trying to convince you of anything in addition please be careful and pay attention to your own responses because when we are discussing evil it can invade us and affect our shadows and our vulnerabilities before we even realize it so while I was developing this lecture I had to remember Young's warning and collected works volume 10 that the site of evil Kindles evil in the soul there is no getting away from this fact the victim is not the only sufferer everybody in the vicinity of the crime including the murderer suffers with him or her I'm not too long ago a friend of mine was jogging through a park in Atlanta suddenly he became upon a body lying on the jogging path my friend recognized the person lying there as a fellow jogger that he is for years it turned out that his fellows auger had been robbed and murdered shortly before my friend discovered him my friend doesn't believe that he will ever get completely over this experience or that he will ever be able to jog in the way that he did before which was free of fear because of how dramatically evil affects us when it's close to home I found that is a difficult and confusing topic to discuss to begin with most of us simply don't want to look at it directly in general we want to deny it and have it be somewhere else like in the Middle East Africa the inner city we don't deny that terrible things have happened and are happening but we continue to delude ourselves by saying that it is somebody else somewhere else who is doing it now in the years that I worked in the inner city of Glen to realize that almost without our knowing it we have been so brainwashed by rationalistic and materialistic ways of thinking that we have formed a frame of reference that leaves little space in our vision of life or how we think life should be for a principle of human destructiveness and when we see the evidence of this destructiveness all around us as my friend yet we prefer not to believe that the evils we see exist in our lives in the sphere of our spiritual development we prefer to think to rationalize and to take the simplistic pragmatic point of view that the evil around us could be eliminated by more education a better political system a better economic system better psychological conditioning or commitment to one more war whether it is actual or social or committing more fully to the religious war of good against evil but what happens when we ask ourselves if these things are the answer why aren't we doing them we don't have to follow this line of thinking very far and to have to consider that evil really is a force in the world and we need to accept that reality but for most of us accepting this reality challenges us to have to overhaul our whole world view and that can be a very painful and difficult task it usually takes a shock of some kind to force us to begin overhauling our worldview this is true because overhauling our worldview means that we have to begin confronting our own shadow sides it may also mean that we may have to cultivate and refine our powerful emotions pragmatists want to ignore their emotions out of the fear that they can lead them astray which in fact repressed crude and uncultivated emotions actually can but without our emotions we are not engaged in life we have known to ourselves out we have buried our passions and have trouble rousing ours into action and out of our passivity when we finally act then the things we do see either too little too late or too hard to be effective and as analysts we see examples of these tendencies and couples and families almost everyday most of the time we find it easier to live and denial or even if we accept the force of evil as a reality to project it far away from ourselves it is a much more challenging task to accept Yoon's advice and to begin looking into our own shadows looking at the demons and devils within ourselves as the foundation or starting points for looking at evil in general it is this necessary inner journey that enables us to face the complexity of evil the paradoxes and mysteries in it as an archetypal force as an archetypal force and finally how we can face and deal with it without enabling it the way our unconscious and simplistic approaches do I believe that if we really want to listen to you or to any of our great religious traditions and want to see the force of evil in the world realistically or for that matter to be able to see ourselves and truly understand how we are living we must break out of the rationalistic materialistic way of thinking we have been born and indoctrinated into after all you is clear in his book modern man in search of a soul that the gods that we are called to overthrow so are the idolized values of our conscious world so then the first thing we must do is to open ourselves up to being able to look at life and into ourselves poetically mythologically and symbolically um says in collected works 18 that now we have no symbolic life and we are badly in need of the symbolic life only the symbolic life can express the needs of the soul the daily needs of the soul mind you now listen carefully now these are powerful statements you continues by saying the symbolic life is the foundation of a life of depth and meaning without a symbolic foundation we're in danger of pursuing make-believe lives based on cultural ideas of the good life or other people's definition of how we should live now in our personal and collective lives are hollow in this sense the door to evil is open on many unconscious levels as we're going to see when we think about the symbolic life we're reminded about the stories in mythology whether an actual myths or in the stories of our great religions our timeless myths and religious stories are metaphors to give shape to and enable us to understand the universal archetypal realities which underlie our psychic experiences our profound experiences of being human these are also the underlying forces that can drive our lives and compel our behaviors without our knowing it when they are unconscious having some knowledge of this way of perceiving life is an essential requirement if we and in my professional organs that means our egos are going to be able to have a knowledge of and a relationship with the deeper layers of our psyche and the reality of who we are and how we are actually living with her ego the part of a psyche that we think of as AI or conscious mind or everyday brain that tries to run our daily lives lacks these ways of understanding ourselves in life we are cut off from being able to relate from ourselves that is our self with a capital S our own center the ground of our personal being now you need to find ourselves is the greater entity which includes our ego and incorporates our personal and collective unconscious our dreams our great emotions our potentials and our lifeforce come from the self the archetypes of the collective unconscious dwell in the south well the interrelatedness of our interior life depends upon our ability to think and to feel symbolically as does our ability to have a more grounded perspective on life and a sense of inner meaning and security in other words for us to feel that our life has a purpose and a unique value in the scheme of things we must be able to think and live symbolically and without this ability and the interrelatedness within our interior lies our ability to live without fear and to have peace of mind will be very limited without these interconnections our lives will be confined to shallow levels of meaning dry cold or overly sentimental ways of engaging in life emotionally a limited capacity to give and receive loss and it will be easy for the archetypal energies within us and in our unconscious complexes to take us over and force us to live them out unconsciously now many of us are aware that humanism at times sees good and evil is relative to our perceptions because this perspective often coincides with how we work with our shadows Newton's work has frequently been confused with that humanistic point of view however again was very clear that he saw evil as real and thought we must recognize it as real Lucifer Satan and the devil are archetypal images they have different archetypal insinuations and they represent different phases of how the archetype of evil can channel our destructive energies now for us to be able to understand the reality of ourselves and evil as well it is helpful to know a little bit about archetypes and archetypal of energies in describing the nature of archetypes Jung says and collected works 10 an archetype is like an old Water Course along which the water of life has flowed for centuries digging a deep channel for itself therefore it has become a pattern in our psyche that directs the flow of a particular portion of our life energy we can see this energy through our emotional responses to it and then through the images and ideas that they evolved from our experiences of it for example in the judeo-christian heritage we see the destructive force of forces in life imaged in the ideas of Satan Lucifer and the devil and so on the destructive force in the world was a reality for you which also meant it was an archetypal force inherent in our nature the image it takes depends upon how we respond to it and how we have been taught to respond to it the devil is an archetypal image but it doesn't fully define the archetype which has many different images and experiences in different cultures and religions newse disagreement with the Catholic Church was that during his lifetime the church considered evil as an absence of good and not a reality in itself you understood that we have a great reluctance to confront the many dimensions of evil both in life and in ourselves but he also thought that in general nothing could be transformed or fully dealt with unless it was first acknowledged as a reality and that we cannot learn how to deal with the complexities of evil until we can acknowledge and confront it as a reality so when I think about talking about evil from a union perspective I believe that we should begin in that archetypal area of our personal unconscious that we refer to as the shadow in general our shadow is all of the parts of ourselves potentially good and bad that we denied growing up we usually repress them in our efforts to form a personality and we want to form a personality that will be acceptable and give us as but safety as possible in our early circumstances we often look to our dreams to shed some light on this area of ourselves and what is going on in it the situation becomes more challenging when our unconscious is telling us through our dreams that we really do need to look into our shadows so let me give you an example Marie was a woman in her mid 40s initially came into CV because she was having recurring dream in the dream she was being chased by women who were dressed as Nazis they wore the brown shirts with the red armbands with swastikas on them and in her dream these ferocious determined women were coming closer and closer to Marie as she cowered in terror in a closet in the basement of her home Marie saw them is driven machine like creatures who totally disregarded human and feminine boundaries the terror that Marie felt is typical of our response to evil when it threatens in the dream these female figures represent the shallow side of Marie's personality as same-sex dream figures do in human psychology the shadow as many of you know represents the dark feared unwanted side of our personality it contains the cut off repressed qualities in our personalities that we rejected in order to become the person we wanted to be or needed to be so we could feel safe and accepted as we grew up now these qualities feel evil to Marie because to recognize and to accept them would threaten the security of her self-image but the self with a capital S the voice of the greater intelligence within her is showing Marie that these elements and her personality are becoming threatening in some ways they also picture what she is doing to herself and she must in this case find a way to recognize and integrate them or live with an increasing sense of unhappiness now in this plane in our psyche we're dealing with a fairly simple level of evil that when recognized and integrated can be transformed to strengthen and broaden who we are as Murray worked with these images by reflecting upon her history making associations to the images and doing active imagination with them she discovered they represented her ability to achieve worth through attaining desired goals and developing a feeling of control over her life and future in other words they were symbolizing her denied sense of personal power so far that sounds good but then we realized that by failing to recognize her worth in power her inner need to do this had taken on a devastating negative capacity that had pursued her relentlessly with self-criticism and self-doubt she was treating herself like an object without love respect and dignity she also recognized that she was following in her mother's and grandmother's footsteps because she was beginning to create a negative atmosphere around herself that echoes the feelings of misery and scarcity in their lives she feared that if this negativity continued she could end up dying of cancer the same way her mother had now there are several important things that we can learn about evil from this simple example the first one is that to acknowledge the power and these negative images doesn't mean to embrace them it means to recognize them and to begin to search for the meaning behind them this is the only way we can discover if the telogen of the cells is directing a part of our individuation process through these dream images the next thing we can learn is that some kind kinds of evil some kinds of negative archetypal energy can be healed and transformed through self-knowledge and integration the third thing for us to consider is that what we think of as evil can rarely be transformed by direct confrontation in other words to fight evil can frequently cause it to strengthen and arm itself in order to fight back for instance if Murray tried to directly confront what we might call her negative attitudes she would most likely find them very resilient then her self-criticism would escalate in the face of her struggles and difficulties and trying to overpower these negative aspects of herself that were making her miserable the fourth thing we might notice is that Murray felt terrified in the dream whenever we feel a major emotion like terror rage intense anger or hurt we're probably touching a major archetypal issue in our lives that can go in a very destructive direction if we're not careful with it overall I think that we can see that what initially appeared as evil in the dream is a call for Murray to develop more consciousness in order to better fulfill her life and future now the example of Murray's dream shows us that the shadow can to have two aspects one that is dangerous and the other that is eye also we as we also saw where the Marines shadow became a destructive force in her life or helped her build a new life depended upon the way she approached it through her dream material however deciding now to approach these images is it always so simple as use associate dr. marie-louise von Franz points out in Chapter three of man in his symbols dr. von Franz quotes a story from the Quran in order to illustrate the paradoxical nature of our shadows of evil in the nature of decisions we face on this journey now dr. von France writes the ethical difficulties that arise when one meets one shadow or well described in the 18th book of the Quran in this tale Moses meets Peter the green wanderer first angel of God in the desert they wander along together and keator expresses his fear that Moses will not be able to witness his deeds without indignation if Moses cannot bear with him and trust him Peter will have to leave presently Keter scuttles the fishing mode of some poor villagers then before Moses eyes he kills a handsome young man and finally he restores the fallen the Fallen wall of a city of unbelievers Moses cannot help expressing his indignation so peter has to leave him before his departure however he explains the reasons for his actions by scuttling the boat he actually saved it for its owners because pirates were on their way to steal it as it is the fisherman can salvage it the handsome young man was on his way to commit a crime and by pillaging Peter saved his pious parents from Infini by restoring the wall to pious young men were saved from ruin because their treasure was very beneath it Moses who had been so morally indignant saw too late that his justice had been to his judgment had been too hasty Peters doing had seemed to be totally evil but in fact they were not dr. von Franz continues by saying looking at the story naively one might assume that keator is the lawless capricious evil shadow of pious law-abiding Moses but this is not the case Peter is much more the personification of some secret creative actions of the Godhead for in my language the creative intelligence of the cell we can see from these examples how in them the union view of the shadow and evil and how we work with them is paradoxical and how the participation of the intelligence of the self forming our life from within complicates this entire picture but there are other situations that we need to consider a few years ago another woman Janice came in to see me with another recurring dream in this dream she was being chased through a pitch-black movie theater up one aisle and down the other a large man was pursuing her with a butcher knife and trying to kill her Janice told me that her previous therapist suggested to her that she simply stop turn around face the man and embrace him then Janice said I just couldn't do that it was too scary and of course she was right not to do that we all need to listen to our fear before acting options like screaming for help or running out of an exit didn't seem open to her my response was that the dream was telling her something else I believe it was telling her that we needed to work very carefully on healing her past healing her fear and developing her ability to life nourish and take loving care of herself as a support for her becoming more self-reliant and self empowered within a few years her whole life had changed and it's always interesting for me to see how fast our symptoms may recede once we have energetically committed to our inner work because Janice was willing to listen to her here her dreams and not to be naive and seeking a solution to it what seemed at first to be evil and destructive and what could have been devastating became a turning point in her life in a situation like Janice's the 39th hexagram in the e-team obstacles or extractions can give us a helpful perspective and his translation Richard William says in the sex grant we're facing a dangerous abyss before us and a steep mountain behind us we cannot retreat or advance our obstacles cannot be overcome directly the advice from the eaching is to join forces with fins of a like mine and put oneself under the leadership of someone equal to the situation and then listen to them with both ears RL wing in his translation of the same hexagram suggests that like flowing water meeting an obstacle we must pause an increase in strength and volume until we flow over the obstacle this is what Janice was doing in her work she was pausing and through working with her unconscious building up to inner strength and substance to successfully overflow the obstacles in her life now let us take a minute to look at another dream Grady is a middle-aged professional men by all appearances he is fairly successful but his wondering why he has been feeling a loss of energy for over a year a low-grade sense of misery and why he wakes up every day with a knowing sense of dissatisfaction as we will see shortly it doesn't make any difference really whether he's a doctor a dentist a lawyer buy for a corporate executive or whatever we can all have these kinds of experiences Grady's recurring dream was that he was in a small city in the debtor probably Iraq he said he was in the second story the top floor of a large house firing the machine gun the town was being overrun by an army of terrorists in the background a group of middle eastern women were making the warlike noises that we hear the make at times in support of the terrorists grading you that if he were called he would be tortured and killed as we discuss the dream we quickly realized that a desert pictured the emotional landscape that Grady lived in he lived and worked in a determined way an atmosphere that was achievement-oriented competitive anxious and in the negative sense very patriarchal there were no feminine values present in his work environment but what in the world of these terrorists picturing in me he asked in part of me be this evil and brutal of course itself has picked the terrorists for this dream imagery for a reason we naturally connect terrorists with evil but the Union approach is to always search for the meaning in our images including the meaning and how to face absolute evil so Grady and I began to talk about the terrorists our discussion with something like this terrorists not only want to kill us they're willing to kill themselves in the process this attitude shows us a kind of aggression that the psychoanalyst Eric from' calls malignant aggression in his books on evil and human destructiveness malignant aggression is the kind of aggression that is meant to control life by destroying it and destroying our spirit of life malignant aggression is purely power oriented its source usually comes from an extreme sense of despair that is based on helplessness and alienation now remember that word alienation we're going to come back to it you also says that the spirit of evil is feared and the negation of life because terrorists like the ones in Grady's dreams are one of the extreme examples of malignant aggression along with rapists murderers assassins and mass murderers I want to take a few minutes to explore the source of this kind of evil and as you reflect on these matters later you may join me in wondering why these themes are so predominant in our field of entertainment now if we consider for a moment the horror of a high school student shooting teachers and classmates we need to ask ourselves what is the source of this kind of evil this kind of malignant aggression is it mental illness is it the presence of guns and a culture of violence or are these types of things uniting with a deeper symptomatology in our society is there a kind of despair that surfaces through our most vulnerable young people but spare of hopelessness an inability to find a place in the tribe for in other words alienation are we forcing our children into lives of feeling externally judged being members of ability groups teams levels of performance in organizations on a collective scale to the point it is destroying their personal spirit of life and I think we must also ask ourselves how much the way we have structured our schools reflects the structures that you and I are living by later as we were discussing his dream Brady said damn maybe I've created the center that desert maybe I have been so focused on my goals wanting the best for myself and my family that I am actively negating some of the life around me my life can the goals I thought were so good the good intentions I focused my life on my ideals actually be fostering these inner terrorists now Grady is beginning to ask himself the right questions he has to find the courage to face his life realistically to step out of the cultural brainwashing of his history and to listen to his inner life beginning with the feelings he has denied at this point we might ask ourselves what creates these inner terrors and our inner and outer terrorists created in similar ways Erich Fromm is correct in concluding that despair and alienation create people who seek power control and to transcend their situation by violence even to themselves but we also have to ask ourselves what happens when entire groups of people become disillusioned humiliated and impoverished when groups feel helpless and hopeless when the structures of ideals and values that they purpose and meaning to their lives has collapsed fail them or have been taken away from them and when they may also feel worthless and victimized in union terms we would say this group of people has lost the myth that supported their lives these losses open the door to the archetype of evil to become the foundation of a new myth that brings meaning to them through power and destructiveness we see examples of this condition in post-world War Germany in the Middle East today and in fact in segments in our own society now it is also interesting to look at how we can alienate and disenfranchise parts of ourselves until they become desperate actors than our unconscious and in our bodies it's Grady reflected on his dream he realized that he had focus so intently on his goals and certain values that he had become in essence a fundamentalist and how he lived his life he was stretching himself in a way that disenfranchised and threatened to annihilate parts of himself his emotional feminine and feeling parts he had lost his sense of knowing how to value his experiences and the way that he was living and he was beginning to realize that such a loss caused him to be unable to value himself as well he also began to realize that his self for the capitalist was sending him a message by showing him that these disowned parts of himself have the power to strike back with force and poignancy we also concluded that this dream was a gift of warning to him because these forces could escalate their attack into a stroke a heart attack or cancer or some other serious form the point of this discussion about malignant aggression is that whether it is individual societal or personal it is a call for consciousness a call for a rock-solid look at our reality and the courage to see how we hide from life and sabotage ourselves as Grady began to have an active imagination to dialogue with the leader of the terrorists in his dream he made some startling discoveries politer told him that we in the Middle East are passionate people we are driven by feelings can't you see that we are the passion the rage and the love that can connect you to the essentials of life can't you see we are pictured as enemies because we are enemies to your arrogant one-sided over controlled approach to life as he listened to this image in a shadow Grady was beginning to get a sense of his need for the second kind of aggression that Erich Fromm wrote about Prohm called this kind of aggression benign aggression and this kind of aggression our street is directed towards preserving life and having a spirit of aggression and adventure and support of life if Grady can open his attitudes to preserving and fostering his inner life his strength and energy will increase so will his capacity to be more loving and more fully alive he will be able to loosen his passions and how he lives take more risk quit dreading failure and break his internalized cultural condition traditions the capacity for vinayan aggression is a must to protect our love of life or tender places and our ability to be creative when you and collected works v wrote that the spirit of evil is fear and negation he went on to say that it infuses us with the poison of weakness and regression he points out that for us to grow and transform fear must become a challenge and a task because only boldness can deliver us from fear he continues by saying that if the risk are not taken to growth then the meaning of life is somehow violated and the future is condemned to hopeless staleness as Grady pondered his dream he has gradually experienced his own sense of courage shifting from his former ideals of achievement and overcoming obstacles to preserving life pursuing his entertaining and allowing his ambitions to reflect his love of life talking about dreams of terrorists brings me to another point and that is how do we respond when we have to look evil in the face he makes a striking statement when he says in ion that is quite within the bounds of possibility for a man to recognize the relative evil of his nature but it is a rare and shattering experience for him to gaze into the face of absolute evil but this is exactly what we have to do but this is exactly what we have to face as well when we run into a person a group or a society that has come become possessed by the archetype of evil or possessed by myth dominated by this architect how can we face unrelenting malignant progression well I must admit that I don't really know the answer to that question but there are two lines of thinking that inform me the first thing that I think is that we must do our best to take a clear moral stand against this kind of evil this means that we must stand with strength and use the full force of benign aggression to preserve and protect life even if it means we must become completely ruthless in our actions and we must remember that to slip into the dial sentimental idealism or to fight evil half-heartedly opens us to being contaminated and even if soared by it but we must stand not only with strength but also with great humility not righteousness the nature of life teaches us repeatedly that we are unable to see the evil in the good and the good that is in evil taking place in our lives some of you may remember that in Gardez great poetic drama Faust we find mustafa Lee's the devil in the drama complaining that people don't appreciate him because they don't realize that without him nothing would ever happen in the world but asked by Faust who he is he replies that he is part of that force which would do evil yet forever it works for the good so in the face of absolute evil I think we must be able to respond with strength and if necessary ruthless this and yet with humility and a renewed search for consciousness there is another question we have to face as well what happened - we are the victim of absolute evil I have worked with people who have been tortured abused as children and held as sex slaves I can easily understand that these situations can be more than the human heart can stand and yet deep in our souls there is the possibility of the resilience in the depth of our humanity that can heal and transcend these experiences in order to illustrate this possibility I would like to share a story with you that informs me it is part of Sir Lawrence van der Pol story which he relates in the DVD interview with him titled hastened slowly sir Lawrence is the author of over 20 books was a great friend and a biographer of young as a British officer he spent most of World War two in a Japanese prisoner of war camp for British soldiers and from that experience he tells the story I remember a particularly nasty execution which my friend Nicholas and I had to stand in formation with our young officers to watch they were executing two soldiers who had gotten too close to the prison fence the way these soldiers died was indescribably moving one was tied between two posts driven into the ground and they had banned that practice on him the other was beheaded as he knelt on the gravel at the moment the execution started a British officer standing between Nicholas and my who was frail because he had been tortured began to collapse I said to myself this mustn't happen because it will spread I felt we must face this up right and look it in the eye and I put my arm around this band in a way the Japanese couldn't see to hold him up as I did so I felt Nicolas from the other side instinctively doing the same thing I felt the officer between us straighten up we stood and looked at the man being been netted I wanted to look away and pretend it wasn't happening but a voice inside of me said you can't do that because you would be betraying the man who is being killed if you do that you must go through it with him that is your contribution here and now you must go through it you must be killed with him if you're going to understand what is going on the story has informed me as I live and work for years it has helped me looked reality including suffering and evil in the eye it has helped me work with people who have suffered horrible things and it might makes me thank God that I have never faced evil in this way it also makes me thank God for how in the face of such evil the human spirit can respond with a depth of consciousness and humanity that can inspire and inform us all and I bring these reflections unable to close I want to say that I realize we have followed what may have seen to be a confusing path between the inner world and the outer world between the personal and different individuals and groups between what we think of our shadows and what we think of is the archetypal nature of evil the fact is that the nature of what I am talking about is quite confusing both shadow and evil have archetypal foundations that are frequently intertwined but there is a thread that runs through all of these circumstances around evil that I have been mentioning that thread is that evil is a call perhaps a demand from life for us to develop a more profound sense of self knowledge and consciousness it may help us to remember another well-known quotation from you when he passionately says in an interview that the world hangs by a slender thread and that thread is the consciousness of man we are the great danger what if something goes wrong with the psyche but we know nothing about it and it seems that if we are well fed and clothed we have little urge to learn about ourselves and that is our greatest mistake of all and the few examples I have given we can see an important truth evil as it is symbolized in our shadows is a call for consciousness for holders and for completing the pattern for the development of our lives that is inherent in our gray yourself and each time we integrate part of our shadow we reduce the evil in the world but when we fail to do this to confront and integrate our shadow we add to the truth of the statement that the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr made in the mid 20th century that most evil is not done by evil people but by good people who don't know what they're doing you helped us to understand that it's important to become conscious of evil and we as individuals and as a society cannot learn to deal with the complexities of evil until we can truly acknowledge evil and confront it as a reality I believe that the evil we face in the world has the purpose of calling or compelling us out of our childlike state of unconsciousness our obsession with the good life the happy life the secure life and to force us to engage in the blood sweat wrist tears love and laughter of real life and while absolute evil may not be able to be integrated it can perhaps awaken us to our better selves and our need to look for the kind of consciousness that talked to you thought our future depended on thank you

Channel: Bud Harris

Views: 13,032

Keywords: Dr. Bud Harris, Jungian Psychology, Confronting Evil, Evil

Id: dKy6NKAbHfs

Length: 57min 21sec (3441 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 17 2014