‘Born on this date: Jung and Huxley’

     
First published in 2014, this has become one of the most visited posts in Magpie history, so here it is again.

It’s a notable pairing. Born on this date were C.G. Jung in 1875, and Aldous Huxley in 1894. Both accomplished so much for which the world is indebted. As a pioneer in psychoanalysis, Jung advanced our understanding of the mind and human behavior by defining the characteristics of introversion and extroversion; by providing us the concept of the collective unconscious; and by postulating how the identity of the individual is shaped by archetypal symbols. He examined man through a microscope. Aldous Huxley saw man through a telescope, predicting social dysfunction with eerie prescience. His Brave New World (1931) has been warning one feckless generation after another of the perils of surrendering one’s humanity for the promise of a better society. His book predates the rise of Hitler and the bloodiest years of Stalin, to name a few, thus lacking the hindsight that benefitted Orwell, and yet that foresight is what makes Huxley’s story even more scary. It also doesn’t help that emerging technologies seem to vindicate his predictions; in a television interview with Mike Wallace decades after the publication of Brave New World, Huxley said there never could be a drug like Soma. Today we know otherwise.

Carl Jung was the spiritual scientist among the psychoanalysts. Freud dismissed Jung’s explorations of mysticism, which partially caused the break between the two. His research into symbolism, particularly as regards alchemy, garners him devotees around the world to this day. There are those of us who enjoy the study of various esoteric streams who see Jung’s research as essential to balancing the headiness of the highly speculative and undefinable intuitive.

The C.G. Jung Foundation and the C.G. Jung Institute of New York will present an advanced seminar on Wednesdays, from January 28 through May 13, 2015, titled “The Alchemical Opus: Demystifying What It Means for the Client to Work in Psychotherapy.” The course description:

The alchemists used the term “opus,” or “the work,” to refer to their process of changing base metals into gold. This implies not a magical transformation of material, but one of labor and persistence. Descriptions of alchemists and their processes show us that transformation requires our active engagement—dedicated work, in fact—to achieve the psychological growth that we hope for. Psychotherapy serves as the modern version of alchemy in its efforts to forge and create a personality that is, like gold, malleable but incorruptible. But in an era of re-parenting and corrective emotional experience, clients are often not aware of what work they need to do to make their time in psychotherapy effective in bringing about change.

This course will utilize contemporary research, timeless stories, and ancient images to explore the clinical dimensions of the clients’ role in psychotherapy. Both therapists and clients are invited to attend.

Learning Objectives:

• Summarize basic alchemical concepts and apply them to clinical work.
• Identify archetypal patterns underlying clinical work.
• Identify and apply effective clinical practices based on research.
• Recognize differences between clients’ resistance and lack of information about how to use therapy.
• List 8 of possible 10 tools that their clients will be able to utilize to make their work in therapy more effective.
• Identify which tools clients may be avoiding or unaware of, and identify strategies to help them use these tools.
• Use techniques to help patients effectively and productively channel their emotions.
• Help patients to utilize the therapeutic relationship more effectively.
• Encourage patients to assume appropriate responsibility for their actions without self-attack.
• Instruct patients to utilize stories, literature, and basic schemas to achieve their goals.
• Help clients to recognize and challenge cognitive assumptions that prohibit progress.
• Identify clients’ opportunities to utilize challenging issues for growth.
• Identify appropriate tasks for clients to use in pursuing their psychological growth outside of sessions.

Instructor: Gary Trosclair, LCSW, DMA


Those who pursue the spiritual alchemy found in Rosicrucianism and other disciplines recognize an obvious kindred thinking in this science. There is no reason why the two approaches cannot complement each other.

Aldous Huxley too was concerned with the soul of man. In addition to his social theorizing, he was a magpie himself, studying the world’s religions and producing the book The Perennial Philosophy. Before anyone had heard of Joseph Campbell, Huxley’s study of comparative religion finds there is a “Natural Theology” common to all the religious teachings he examined that offers “an absolute standard of faith by which we can judge both our moral depravity as individuals and the insane and often criminal behavior of the national societies we have created.” People everywhere endeavor to find communion with God, and if they cannot be saintly themselves, they can follow the examples of those who were.

Speaking of birthdays, I’m going to be late for a friend’s party if I don’t sign off. Have a good night. Please enjoy these videos:

     

‘Gnosis from an old memory, literally’

     
A group photo of Brother Masons found its way to my Facebook wall. A posed shot obviously following a joyous and joyful church service.

It provokes mixed feelings. Of course on the one hand it’s great to see a bunch of friends enjoying what makes them happy and lively, and in second place is the lonely feeling that comes from being reminded of some Masonic orders’ artificial membership restrictions based on religious tests. Thirdly, I am simply kind of befuddled and indifferent. And so I want to concentrate and reconcile the competing sentiments so that understanding prevails. That ain’t gonna happen in the half hour I’ll devote to this blog post, because for as long as I’ve had ideas on the matter, I have viewed the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth as a bridge that ought to unite Jews and Christians to a degree, instead of separating them irreconcilably. Jesus was Jewish. The New Testament is, arguably, and except several texts, a Jewish document. This is what enabled me physically, mentally, spiritually, and ethically to work my way East in the local Chapter of Rose Croix years ago. So I am stymied on those occasions when I consider these Christian-only fraternities within Freemasonry. They convene, sometimes in church, and close the doors, and what do they do – assuming they’re not just dinner clubs for the VIPs? They delve into Jewish mysticism, pretending it’s not proprietary to Judaism because all religions supposedly have some identical mystic path. I guess all religions speak Hebrew as well.

Magpie edit: Muskrat, stop bugging me about this.

Anyway, the photo jogged my memory sufficiently to send me directly to this one specific issue of Bro. Jay Kinney’s long missed Gnosis magazine. For anyone or anything to focus my mind so keenly as to allow me to step adroitly into my library (the floor is covered with piles of books needing to be filed away) and nimbly locate this one particular magazine is something quite powerful indeed. (By contrast, after thirteen years of carrying a cell phone every day, I still am capable of forgetting it somewhere.) But there it is: Issue No. 30 from the winter of 1994. Its theme is Sufism, Islam’s mystical branch, itself divided into numerous schools. Hardly my field of expertise, and yet I’m not utterly lost thanks to one of my favorite courses in my university days.

“…know that Sufis prefer the knowledge that comes by inspiration, to the exclusion of that acquired by study,” writes F.E. Peters, a professor of mine many years ago. “Again, they desire neither to study such learning nor to learn anything of what authors have written on the subject; to inspect neither their teachings nor their arguments. They maintain on the contrary that the ‘way’ consists in preferring spiritual combat, in getting rid of one’s faults, in breaking one’s ties and approaching God Most High through a single-minded spiritual effort. And every time those conditions are fulfilled, God for His part turns toward the heart of His servant and guarantees him an illumination by the lights of understanding.”

The Sufism issue of Gnosis delivers diverse articles on Sufi traditions, including that which popped into my head by way of that photo on Facebook. Written by Ya’quh ibn Yusuf, then a doctoral candidate studying Jewish mysticism at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, it includes a few paragraphs that can rattle some people. Like me.

I’d love to provide you the entire article. I want to hand you the magazine. You should have your lodge purchase the entire collection of back issues. I’ll share only that which I remembered, boldfacing the specifics. Do not be distracted by the mentions of Sufism. Or perhaps you should, mentally replacing the word Sufi with the word Masonry.

“…most of us in the West are already Christians or Jews. And while I believe it may be a mistake to narrowly identify with the religion of one’s ancestors, there is also a price to be paid for ignoring one’s own ancestral heritage. Our religious background is very much a kind of ‘local material’ out of which we are constructed. If we seek to follow Sufi teachings and develop our connection with God by digging deeply within ourselves, our own religion provides us with tools and a place in which to do some digging.

“Let me offer some examples of how I have seen these issues working themselves out among friends of mine. In Israel most Jews generally identify themselves as either ‘religious’ or ‘secular.’ It takes some courage and initiative to venture beyond these identifications and pursue one’s own spiritual search. I have observed that as they rise to the kind of challenge that Sufi teaching represents, secular seekers typically need to heal their rejection of Jewish tradition, while religious seekers need to overcome a general reflex of defending Jewish tradition as well as their specific allergy to Jesus… [This is] a matter of opening blocked channels to elements of religion which, it turns out, have a life within as well as outside the individual…

“All religions can be viewed not as ends in themselves, but as outer forms of belief and behavior that exist to facilitate inner work. The problem is that each religion also exists as a corporate entity that seeks to promote its own working set of tools and beliefs, and, like religions and sects, every spiritual group has a kind of collective ego that is fed by new adherents. All this should come as no surprise. What I believe we should bear in mind, however, is that too much of a focus on the particular form we are employing – whatever form that might be – serves to keep us stuck on the surface of appearances and prevents the work from moving more deeply within. This is why, as I understand it, Sufi teaching emphasizes ‘completion, not conversion.’

“Thus I have met observant Jews who have a personal relationship with Jesus, but choose not to convert to Christianity, and Christians who admit that their primary relationship is with God the Father. Certainly I know many Sufis who share the essential perspectives of the Prophet Muhammad but choose not to embrace Islam. In each of these cases there is an understandable reluctance to let an institutional mentality appropriate what properly belongs to the greater glory of God…

“Our task, as I understand it, is not to get rid of form on the social and religious levels any more than on the physical level. It is to appreciate the reflections of divinity to be found within form, to make of the forms in which we are involved a vehicle for the Divine. However we may choose to affiliate ourselves, whatever working basis we may choose to embrace, we do well to remember that the work of transformation does not depend on our concepts and categories, but on our actual cooperation with the grace of God.

Rarely am I at a loss for words when writing – fact is, I feel like I’m cheating here – but the above explains my thinking so well that I do not mind relying on it. In the “Great Work,” to borrow a phrase, there is room for Masons of most faith traditions to labor side by side if they want to. I do avoid saying “all” traditions, because somewhere there must be something that cannot fit, and because “all” connotes an absolutism that I sensed from that Facebook photo in the first place.

I am happy for my friends in the photograph. Almost all are smiling, their countenances revealing the satisfaction bubbling from within.

Having read a little about Freemasonry over the years, to me it seems the history of Freemasonry essentially is the story of Masons segregating themselves from other Masons. Try it for yourself: Start with Saint John Baptist Day 1717 when four lodges did you know what, and look at every group that either arose or splintered from another, each claiming to offer the whole Truth and nothing but. In the Christian-only fraternities within Freemasonry, I believe we see not only the promise of a sectarian truth – the “concepts and categories” mentioned by our magazine writer – but also the rejection of Enlightenment thinking (e.g. Anderson’s Constitutions’ Charge Concerning God and Religion) which is the guiding philosophy that enabled Freemasonry to spread throughout the world and endure the centuries so strongly... that it has been able to come into the lives of the very men in the photo.

That’s all I got. I desire neither to change nor intrude into what is, and I hope never to discuss this on The Magpie again. No calls please.
     

‘Mythology and Mysticism’

    
Mythology Cafe, the New York City chapter of the Joseph Campbell Foundation, met for its monthly dinner-lecture last night, despite the disruption in the neighborhood caused by the visit of President Obama across the street. Our topic was “Mythology and Mysticism” in a conversation capably led by Morrin Bass, one of the principals of the New York Awareness Center.

The understanding of mysticism presented at Mythology Cafe causes me to concentrate especially intently to follow what is being said, as one might if conversing with a person whose primary language is foreign. It is a language barrier I encounter almost every time I attend these meetings. This is not because I’m any kind of ascetic follower of a messiah (I am far more interested in the messages than the messengers), but because I think I see the group’s terminology as the product of modern innovating; it is mostly a pastiche of Jungian psychology and what I can only call “New Age” self-improvement. I am not complaining – and it must be remembered we’re part of the Joseph Campbell Foundation! – but I always think there is a larger context that goes unmentioned or even missed.

In leading our discussion, Dr. Bass explained the purposes of mythology and mysticism, saying, in part, that both are necessary in the communication between the subconscious and the conscious, a process that is essential to those who want to change themselves, which she said is the essence of spirituality. Myths are stories that transcend space and time, using universal archetypes to reach each person on an individual level.

Mysticism, if I understood her correctly, offers a means to affect reality.

Tapping into a modern story to illustrate how transcending time and space can alter contemporary reality, she reminded us of the more serious implications of Back to the Future.

The very popular comedy is a fun movie, for sure, but also one that depicts a youth, with the aid of a wizard-figure, who journeys back through time to “tweak” the character of his father and reshape the present. “It’s up to us what to take as reality,” she said. “Our past can be our future. Our future could be our past.” Persephone, Orpheus, Beowulf, and others were cited as examples of ageless stories of transcending existence.

My own understanding of mysticism is best expressed by the great F.E. Peters, a favorite professor during my university days. From his book Judaism, Christianity, and Islam: The Works of the Spirit, excerpted:

Mysticism is sometimes taken as the esoteric understanding of God and His works given to a few chosen souls, or as the immediate apprehension of, and even identity with, God Himself. In either case, mysticism found a profound, if occasionally troubled, place in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.

The sources of the trouble are not far to seek. For one thing, such a privileged understanding seemed to create ‘a church within a church,’ an elite group of believers who, if they did not often trouble those latter members of the flock, certainly troubled their shepherds. And among some of the adepts, their special understanding, their ‘gnosis,’ which they at least thought was more profound, and perhaps even more authentic, than that possessed by the ordinary believer, had the effect of reducing what might be called ‘ordinary revelation’ to an inferior status and, as an occasional corollary, of freeing the adept from the ‘ordinary observance’ prescribed by that other, public revelation. And finally, the mystic’s intuitive leap into the neighborhood, or even the very bosom, of God seemed to violate one of the most profound and strongly held beliefs of the three monotheistic faiths, that in the utter transcendence, the absolute otherness, of God.

Professor Peters’ take on mysticism surely is not foreign to Freemasonry, certain avenues of which are traveled by brethren who discern in its rituals and symbols secrets they appropriate for themselves. I admit to being guilty of this to an extent, but the position held by myself and those like me is not necessarily of our own making. When a member of a private society that exists to explore morality, eschatology, and other adult concerns always is surrounded by fellow members who offer nothing but “kid tested, mother approved” frivolity, even his simple sincerity in studying the rituals and lectures can make him look like an isolated hermit by comparison. He may resign himself to that identity, or embrace it, but it is not entirely of his own creation.

“If a man knows more than others,
he becomes lonely.”

  

C.G. Jung

Everybody should be actuated by both an acknowledgement of a need for self-improvement, and by a strong desire to work toward and achieve that development. I have to do a better job of understanding that there are different methods and language others employ toward that end.

The next meeting of Mythology Cafe will take place Wednesday, August 11 at 7 p.m. at Ciao Stella, located on Sullivan Street, between Bleecker and Third. The topic will be “The Evolution of Religious Belief.” Click here for a description of the topic.