Symbolic meaning can override empirical facts

Voodoo Garden
Ever vigilant, our scarecrow guards our garden against whatever lurks in night shadows

Contrary to what the climate change naysayers wish us to believe, science is grounded in fact, not based on arbitrary opinion: science is an exacting, self-correcting experimental method for determining, based on the information given, what facts are true and what the relationship, if any, exists between facts.[1]

But, as Carl Jung and many others have asserted, there are other equally legitimate whys of knowing based on symbols, mythology, or even through our imagination and our own lived bodily experience.

One such voice is Rita M. Gross writing about Buddhism in in the Spring 2013 edition of Tricycle Magazine in an essay entitled: The Matter of Truth: The Heavy Cost of Literalism. A brief excerpt follows:

“[F]or many modern Buddhists, the symbolic meanings contained in traditional forms are approached with an outlook steeped in the worldview of the European Enlightenment, in which truth and value lie mainly with empirical facts. Truth, in this case, is found as a result of impersonal, objective observation, and it can be duplicated by anyone with proper training under the same circumstances. There is little room in this view of things for affirming meaning as it is communicated through symbolic forms or for the understanding that, for some purposes, the value of symbolic meaning can override empirical facts or even that sometimes factual information is irrelevant to symbolic meaning…

One finds in Buddhist tradition a distinction between "words" and "meaning," which are often very different from one another, and we would do well to consider the traditional advice-whether we are looking at statues or interpreting teachings-to pay attention to symbolic meaning and not be limited to literal meaning.

Traditional people recognize that what is known through imagination, whether or not it can observed empirically, is worthy of portrayal. We moderns, however, though we think ourselves incomparably more sophisticated than traditional people, have little understanding or appreciation of symbolic experience and having committed ourselves to an empirical worldview we live within its narrow confines."

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[1] The only caveat is that our knowledge of the universe, in my opinion, is extremly rudimentary. New discoveries will continue to overthrow established truth, creating the continuing need for new paradigms about the nature of reality.

Jungian Images Haunt My Dreams

DREAM COLLAGE
CC byJean Stimmell 2/2/13

Jung had many profound insights that were far ahead of his time...or even today's time. One such insight is that "Science must recognize the as yet incalculable catastrophe which its advances have brought... [to the] still infantile man of today." (The Symbolic Life, Colume 18 of Jung's Collected Works, par 1367)

Here's what Jung wrote in 1912:

“You see, America does not see that it is in any danger. It does not understand that it is facing its most tragic moment: a moment in which it must make a choice to master its machines or to be devoured by them ...” (PP. 17-18 1912 C. G. Jung Speaking: Interviews and Encounters. Ed., Wm .McGuire and R.F.C. Hull. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977)

Since then, the evidence keeps accumulating that Jung was right:
1) machines have multiplied at an exponential rate, taking over not only our work but our thinking;
2) increasing  machine-like regimentation and bureaucracy have deprived us of our human need for sense of place and uprooted us from community;
3) unimaginable new weapons of mass destruction proliferate in an increasingly unstabile world;
4) and, worst of all, technology-driven, human-caused climate change now threatens our very survival as a species – along with the extinction of many other of our fellow living beings on spaceship Earth.

As Jung wrote 19 years later in 1931:

“The machines which we have invented, for instance, are now our master. Machines are running away with us, they are demons; they are like those huge old saurians that existed when man was a sort of lizard-monkey and deadly afraid of their hooting and tooting. By his will man has invented a Mesozoic world again, monsters that crush thousands by their voice and their weight.”

(P.502 1931 Interpretation of Visions.Claire Douglass. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997. 2 volumes)

* I took these quotes from a wonderful book edited by Meredih Sabini, The Earth has a Soul: C. G. Jung on Nature, Technology and Modern Life.

Hungry Ghosts skittering across the snow

My out-of-body bliss,
merging as one with
Jenness Pond's

shimmering expanse 

of ethereal whiteness, 

is suddenly broken by 

a flock of fallen leaves

skittering toward me 

 like hungry ghosts.

Violence in America: Jung & What's Really Real

 Abu Ghraib haunts my woods, lives in my dreams
CC by Jean Stimmell

Our current national discussion on gun violence in the U.S. prompted me to reread an essay[1] by Carl Jung written at the end of World War II, predicting that our modern age of science and rationality would spawn a cascading increase in societal violence – not a benevolent new order of peace and sanity as envisioned by leading social scientists.

Rather than our new Age of Reason eliminating “the fantastic, mythological world of the Middle Ages,” Jung argues that it simply switched place from outside in Nature to inside our psyches. Rather than nature spirits like fairies, witches, devas, demons and the rest “that terrify and tease mankind: man himself has taken over the role without knowing it and does the devilish work of destruction with far more effective tools than the spirits did.”

Or said another way: “We have lost our superstitious fear of evil spirits and things that go bump in the night, but instead, are seized with terror [by] people who, possessed by demons, perpetrate the frightful deed of darkness.”  The New Town school massacre of twenty, first-grade children is but the latest example.

Writing in 1945 in the aftermath of World War II and Hitler’s reign, Jung says such atrocities are characteristic of the new dark age we find ourselves living in. He calls such violence “psychic epidemics” and notes that it is only when we have completely internalized Nature’s demons that, “the age of total blood baths, total demonization, and total dehumanization could begin:”  

“Even the torture chamber – that staggering achievement of modern times! – has been reintroduced into Europe…Finally, the invention of human slaughter houses –  compared with which the Roman circuses of 2,000 years ago were but a piffling prelude – is a scarcely surpassable achievement of the neo-German spirit.”

Looking at the scope and intensity of increasing psychic epidemics since WW II can only serve to confirm Jung’s prediction. By way of example, let’s look at the racketing up of violence starting with the horrific 911 terrorist attack on the Twin Towers in New York, rapidly followed by our equally horrific response of waging two misbegotten wars resulting in tens of thousands of innocent civilians dead. Extraordinary rendition. Secret torture centers set up around the world including Abu Ghraib. And continuing assassinations around the world, even of Americans, by our drone attacks.

Many intellectuals, such as Henry A. Giroux[2], are baffled by this explosion of violence that  “appears to lack any rational organization.” What is startling, he adds, “is that the logic of war and violence have become addictive, a socially constructed need that we simply cannot get away from.”

Jung position, of course, is the opposite: that this violence is caused precisely because our modern age suffers from too much rational organization, causing us to suppress our evolutionary psychological history still imprinted within us, stretching all the way back to our animal past. And even more grievous, we have lost respect and understanding for the most mysterious and miraculous part of our collective unconscious: Nature Herself.

Despite certain postmodernist claims, we are not solely a “socially constructed self” fashioned from a blank slate: As Charlene Spretnak [3] says, some things are “really real:” the innate wisdom of our bodies, our sense of place, and Nature Herself. We can only deny the “really real” at our own peril.

xxx

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[1] Jung’s essay, Marginalia on Contemporary Events, reprinted in C.G. Jung on Nature, Technology & Modern Life, by Meredith Sabini pp. 130-132.

[2]http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/violence_is_deeply_rooted_in_american_culture_20130122/?ln

[3] The Resurgence of the Real: Body, Nature, and Place in the Hypermodern World by Charlene Spretnak

Restoring Nature's Divinity

Photograph taken along the Merrimack River in Concord, NH, Spring of 2011

“Matter in the wrong place is dirt. People get dirty through too much civilization. Whenever we touch nature, we get clean” – C. G. Jung. 

"You may not associate such bold, earthy sentiments with Swiss psychiatrist C.G. Jung, but he was, in fact, deeply concerned over the loss of connection with nature. He considered natural life to be the 'nourishing soil of the soul.'" So says Meredith Sabini in her illuminating book, The Earth Has a Soul: C.G. Jung on Nature, Technology & Modern Life.

She continues, "Those of us destined to live through this turbulent period of history, the declining phase of Western civilization, could perhaps use a wise elder [like Jung] who stands slightly outside the modern world yet knows it well enough to offer guidance."

SILENCE

Photograph taken through dense fog: Wagon Wheel Farm: 01/12/13

According to Joseph Weissman in his blog Fractal Ontology:

 Silence may be grasped as “the enthusiastic proclamation of energy itself as pure potentiality – a blank canvas, upon which thought dares to create.”

Our Good Ship, Mother Earth: Beached and Vandalized

This image from photo I took at Adams Point, Durham, NH: 01/0613

“It’s possible to regard climate change as a consequence of mental health. Not in terms of strict cause and effect, but as systemic consequences. You tune out the built environment, you buy more stuff to distract yourself. We’re living and participating in a system that industrializes the destruction of the world.”*

* Quote by Craig Chalquist, co-editor with Linda Buzzell of Healing with Nature in Mind.

* Click here to see: Ecopsychology: Whole Earth Mental Health from Utne Reader.