Quest for the Self, Part 3

I continue to work my way through Murray Stein's book Jung's Map of the Soul: An Introduction. In my last post, Quest for the Self, Part 2, I talked about five stages of consciousness that Carl Gustav Jung, the Swiss theorist of the human psyche, posited we members of the species Homo sapiens are capable of traversing.

We start out, as infants, experiencing a "participation mystique" in which we have not yet become aware that we are distinct from everyone and everything in our environment.

In ensuing stages we become more and more "rational," as we learn to differentiate between ourselves and the outside world; as we stop projecting our inner sources of psychic energy, the Jungian "archetypes," out onto entities in our immediate environment; and then as we stop projecting them onto abstract entities such as religious doctrines about God or more secular bastions of allegiance, devotion, and fidelity.

Yet by the time we have become maximally rational, we often find the need to go a step further and deal rationally with all these archetypal fountains of inward energy. This, Stage 5 of the development of consciousness, is the mark of Jungian Self-realization. In this stage, we find it behooves us to interpret the meaning of the symbols that our unconscious mind throws out, into the light of consciousness, by way of our dreams, our fantasies, our preoccupations, and our myths.

Taking symbols seriously, we may even find our way to a conscious understanding of the prime archetype of all, the Self, which is the taproot and guiding force of Jungian "individuation." Individuation is the process by which we are able to become more and more complete as conscious human individuals.

But this level of consciousness, Jung's Stage 5, is not the be-all and end-all. Jung hypothesized that there may be two more stages. Stein writes:

Officially Jung stopped at Stage 5, although ... he contemplated further advances beyond it. There are suggestions in his writings for what could be considered a sixth and even a seventh stage. For example, in his Kundalini Yoga Seminar, given in 1932, Jung clearly recognized the attainment of states of consciousness in the East that far surpass what is known in the West. While he is dubious about the prospects for Westerners to achieve similar stages of consciousness in the foreseeable future, he nevertheless does grant the theoretical possibility of doing so and even describes some of the features such stages would have. The type of consciousness revealed in Kundalini could be considered a potential Stage 7. (Stein, p. 186)

Kundalini yoga is a system of meditation which seeks to carry the practitioner's awareness ever upward to higher and higher centers of energy, called "chakras" (see image at left). The highest chakra, Sahasrara, visualized as residing at the top of the head, represents ultimate consciousness — Stage 7 in Jung's hierarchy.

I envision the attainment of the Sahasrara chakra as mirroring the Buddhist goal of Nirvana.

Stein continues:

Backing up a bit, there is a type of consciousness that is more accessible to the West and would occupy the place between Stage 5 and this putative Stage 7. Later in his own life when he explored the structure and function of the archetypes in the context of synchronicity, Jung suggested that perhaps these apparently inner structures correspond to structures of being in the nonpsychic world. ... [A] possible sixth stage of consciousness would be one that takes into account the wider ecological relation between psyche and world ... a state of consciousness that recognizes the unity of psyche and the material world. (p. 187)

Synchronicity, says Wikipedia, is "the experience of two or more events which are causally unrelated occurring together in a meaningful manner."

My mental model of synchronicity has to do with the death of my Uncle Ralph. In the early 1960s my father was not at home with us in Maryland when his brother was diagnosed with incurable cancer. Dad was on the Pacific island of Guam gathering information to write a report on the U.S. territory's public safety institutions. While Dad was away, over several long months my uncle declined steadily, in great pain, and Dad was heartbroken that he could not be with him. Finally, the end came. When my mother called Dad to inform him, Dad told her he had had the most uncanny dream the night before, in which all the burdens of life seemed abruptly lifted from his shoulders. He woke up joyously convinced that his dream had signaled the end of brother Ralph's great misery, at long last. And so it had done. Calculating the time difference between Maryland and Guam, my mother and father figured Dad's dream had occurred at just the moment that Ralph passed on.

Jung saw synchronicity as, alongside causality, a patterning of events in this world. The events that can only be explained by synchronicity are the uncanny things we encounter in life.

A world where synchronicity is real is a world, said Jung, where (in Stein's words) "apparently inner structures correspond to structures of being in the nonpsychic world." The archetypal potencies we find thrusting their way into our unconscious minds, first, and then via symbols into our conscious awareness are not just inner potencies. They exist in the outer, nonpsychic world as well.


Here, then, is the reason why Jung was careful to say that the archetypes are not actually contained in the psyche per se. They impinge on the psyche from what he termed the "psychoid" gray area between the physical body and the nonphysical mind. If there is indeed a "unity of psyche and the material world," it stands to reason that there must be some interface between the two. Jung's psychoid region is this interface.

To me, these ideas are earthshaking ones, that the patterns of the inner world of the psyche are also patterns hidden in the exterior world; and that these hidden patterns in the exterior world produce meaning through synchronicity, where mere causality as a mode of scientific explanation can produce none.

It is as if these ideas of Jung's about Stages 6 and 7 of the growth of consciousness imply that in Stage 6 the boundary between inside-the-mind and and outside-the-mind begins to crumble; as if the Beatles' lyric "Your inside is out, and your outside is in/Your outside is in, and you inside is out" makes sense. (This lyric is from "Everybody's Got Something To Hide Except For Me And My Monkey" on the "White Album.") At Stage 6 we begin to see that. At Stage 7 we are completely sure.

It is as if Stage 7 consciousness has come full circle, back to the "participation mystique" of infancy in which we have not yet become aware that we are distinct from everyone and everything in our environment. The difference is that originally we did not understand the inner-outer distinction in the first place, while now we are fully conscious of having overcome it.

It is as if the same Beatles song gets it right when it says "the deeper you go, the higher you fly, the higher you fly, the deeper you go." To Jung, the highest circle of attainable wholeness is Anthropos, the spiritual ideal. Next lower in the hierarchy of circles of wholeness is Homo, our everyday ideal of human perfection, rooted in our ordinary ego-consciousness. Below that is Serpens, the serpent, the symbolical root source of all animal wisdom. The lower two circles of wholeness are Lapis, the integrity associated with minerals and plant life, and Rotundum, the circle which roots the hierarchy of wholeness in the place where physical matter emerges from pure energy.

A neat vertical axis of the growth of wholeness and unity, no? Well, Jung also illustrated it as coming full circle and having its South Pole, Rotundum, meet its North Pole, Anthropos (see Stein, p. 167). The deeper you go, the higher you fly, the higher you fly, the deeper you go.