Follow Your Bliss (Jungian Wholeness, Part 6)

In this ongoing Power of Myth series of posts I've been considering how the thought of the late ambassador of myth Joseph Campbell jibes with that of the very-much-still-alive scientist Stuart Kauffman in his latest book, Reinventing the Sacred: A New View of Science, Reason, and Religion.

Kauffman talks of the ceaseless and unpredictable creativity of the cosmos as "God enough" to command our devotion and awe. This creativity can be esteemed as sacred when science stops insisting that nothing is real but the meaningless dances of subatomic particles, out of which, as ghostly metaphysical illusions, arise all higher things: form, function, life, agency, value, meaning, consciousness.

Kauffman argues that these higher things are not just illusory emanations of particle dances. Real in and of themselves, they're emergent entities taking their own rightful place in the roster of items composing the "furniture of the universe."


As I have hinted at in my Jungian Wholeness series, in the light of Kauffman's investigations it makes sense to count as emergent items in the list of all the real things in our universe the aspects of the human psyche mapped by Carl Jung, the Swiss psychologist who took the button of Freud's insights into the human unconscious and sewed on it a coat of many colors.

Jung found that our minds come with certain pre-fabricated images and patterns by which we organize our mental experiences. These are the "archetypes," which number in the dozens or hundreds. There is an archetype for the mother, the father, the hero figure of myth and legend ... and one for the self.

That last is the central source of all the archetypal images, the ground of all our innate psychic tendencies toward structure, order, and integration. It lies at the core of the ego — it is the seed of the "I" at the center of our consciousness.

Yet, as an archetype, the self is not itself something we are conscious of (until a brilliant scientist like Jung comes along and "discovers" it, that is).

Every unconscious archetype is instead a sort of template for how we may best organize our experiences. There are abstract archetypes for (for instance) order, for chaos, and for dualities qua dualities ... such as the order/chaos duality.

So when Jung detects the archetype-of-archetypes by virtue of which we can come into possession of a transcendent sense of our very own self, taken as a whole, what he means is that when our experience resonates with this particular pattern or image it tends to be amplified and confirmed in a uniquely potent way.


Joseph Campbell tells us of a non-intellectual, spiritual reason to take myth seriously. It's not to help us create an intellectual map, scientific or otherwise, of reality and truth, which is Stuart Kauffman's main pursuit as a scientist.

And perhaps surprisingly, it's not to find the so-called meaning of life, a desideratum of a great many philosophers and theologians. There is something of great value beyond meaning. "I think," Campbell tells Bill Moyers in The Power of Myth,

what we're seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonances within our own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive. That's what it's all finally about, and that's what these clues help us to find within ourselves. (p. 5)

Campbell famously spoke of "following your bliss":

If you follow your bliss, you put yourself on a kind of track which as been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living. Wherever you are — if you are following your bliss, you are enjoying that refreshment, that life within you, all the time. (p. 91)

To know the rapture of being alive: this admirably expresses the "wholeness" which Jung identified with the affirmation of the archetype he called the self. When we manage to restore our archetypal self-image to its original place at the center of our ego-consciousness, we come alive to bliss and rapture.


This, I think, is what Stuart Kauffman's reinventing the sacred has to bring about, if it is to succeed.

Kauffman himself, it is clear from reading his books, has followed his own bliss in carving out a whole new scientific territory. Kauffman's task has been to find out the deep truths of all incessantly co-constructing, co-evolving, complex systems, including: the evolution of the earth's biosphere; human economic growth and technological progress; the development of the world's legal systems such as English common law; and the natural emergence of the functions of the human mind and consciousness.

So it looks to me as if Kauffman has successfully reinvented the sacred for himself by following his bliss. He has undoubtedly, in so doing, experienced the rapture of being alive that goes along with achieving some measure of Jungian wholeness within himself. He has fulfilled the destiny of a mythic hero, plumbed the depths from which emerge all life and all worlds, and brought to the rest of us an elixir of scientific understanding by dint of which we, too, can reinvent the sacred. Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell would be proud of him.