InPresence 0160: Carl Jung and the End of Humanity -- Reflections on Peter Kingsley's Catafalque #GJW

Hello, I'm Jeffrey Mishlove. Today I'd like to share with you some of my personal reflections on the book Catafalque by Peter Kingsley. The subtitle of that book is Carl Jung and the End of Humanity. Interestingly, this is one of the most stimulating books I've read in a long time. And at the same time, I have to tell you right now, I haven't finished it. I'm not even sure how it ends. But I'm not sure that that quite matters either. I think there's a sense in which it's very appropriate for me to be commenting on this paradoxical book before I've even finished it and come to its ending. It's a very rich book for people who are interested in the life of Carl Jung and the culture behind his enormous body of work. Let me talk a bit about Jung to begin with. First of all, I regard Carl Jung as one of the greatest thinkers of the 20th century, right up there with Karl Marx, Einstein, and Freud, and maybe greater, actually, than all of them. But time will tell about that. My sense is that Peter Kingsley would certainly agree with me. Peter Kingsley, I gather, has spent much of his life investigating the career, the meaning of Carl Jung's psychology, the meaning of it. And that's very important. You know, I was first introduced to Carl Jung when I was an undergraduate taking a course in the psychology of personality at the University of Wisconsin, taught at that time by Professor Stephen Patel, who was a great professor later on. I ran into him at the Wright Institute in Berkeley. He and I seemed to both come to California back in 1969. But that's another story. He only lectured about Jung for maybe 15 minutes in this whole semester-long course on personality psychology. But he said one thing that stuck in my mind, and that is that Carl Jung had written that there were things he couldn't write about, things he couldn't say, truths that he knew that were so frightening, powerful, deep, profound, that humanity wasn't even ready for them. And that's where Patel concluded his thoughts about Carl Jung. For the life of me, as intrigued as I was, I discovered certainly back then in the 1960s, and I think even today, very few universities offer courses or programs in the psychology of Carl Jung. What I experienced there as an undergraduate might be about as much as is still offered today at a great school like the University of Wisconsin. Now, to be fair, they didn't offer courses in Freud either. I think I've told the story how, as an undergraduate in Madison, Wisconsin, I helped found the Psychology Student Association and was elected to be its first vice president after I stood up at the organizing meeting and said to the assembled students there, I became a psychology student in order to learn about myself. But here in this department, they think psychology is mostly about running rats through mazes, and we ought to change that. Indeed, we did. We had a student strike back in 1969. Well, the black students had already organized a student strike. So, the psychology students jumped on the bandwagon and presented our own list of demands to the psychology department. One of them was that they offer a course on Freud, which they did for those handful of students who wanted it. They got Seymour Halleck from the psychiatry department to teach the course. Ironically, that's how I ended up at Berkeley because I enrolled as a graduate student in criminology at Berkeley in 1970. One of my recommendations for being enrolled as a criminology student is that I had studied with Seymour Halleck, who had written about psychiatry and crime. But I'm getting way off track here. The real point I want to make is back then as a psychology undergraduate, there was a friend of a friend, a fellow named Bill. He was a good friend, as I recall, of Marty Rosenblum, who was later known as the Holy Ranger. Yes, my friend Marty, the poet. He became the poet laureate of the Harley-Davidson Motorcycle Company. But that's another long story too. But he had a friend named Bill. Bill wanted to study Carl Jung. Since there were no opportunities at the University of Wisconsin, a great university, he dropped out. I mean, that's kind of what you had to do, either go to Zurich or somewhere in Switzerland or drop out completely. There were a few Jungian institutes. Jung's influence is certainly growing. I don't mean to say he's without influence, but in academia, hardly at all. So, that's background. Now, there's so much to say. Let me try and get to the point here. One of the issues that Peter Kingsley harps on over and over again is the idea that Jung, like all of us, has two different personalities. In the case of Jung, one personality was a scientist. Throughout his career, he kept maintaining he is a scientist, he is a scientist, he is a scientist. Not a mystic, not a prophet, not a person of revelation at all, but a scientist. Of course, the other part of Jung is that he's a deep student of esoteric culture. I hope those of you who are watching this video now, if you haven't already, take a look at the interview recently released with Gary Lachman on the esoteric dimensions of Carl Jung's psychology. You'll see that he was a deep student of alchemy, hermeticism, gnosticism, the I Ching, synchronicity, alchemy. It goes on and on and on. But Peter Kingsley takes it much, much further. Peter Kingsley says it's not just that Jung was a student of esoteric cultures. He was the embodiment of them. He was himself a prophet, akin to Jesus, Mohammed, Mani, the founder of Manichaeism and the other great prophets of history. That, in a sense, Jungian psychology is, like Manichaeism, a new religion destined possibly to become eventually a world religion. Even though Jung spent his entire career insisting that this is not a religion, that this is a question of science, this is the great discovery of the unconscious. Jung, in effect, was using himself as a laboratory. His explorations of the unconscious, well sure, they came from analyzing the dreams of his patients. But now that Jung's Red Book has been published, it's very clear that he is documenting in great detail and with beautiful illustrations, much like the prophet Mani, who was also known as a great painter, did, documenting his journey deep within himself to the depths of his own unconscious where, you know, William James described the mind as sort of a blooming, buzzing confusion. But Jung came up with archetypes and personality types and the process of individuation and a very elegant system. He took that blooming, buzzing confusion and he made it into an elegant and really very popular philosophical system. For example, the Myers-Briggs scale of personality analysis is one of the most widely used personality tests ever. That is based on Carl Jung's psychology. But what Peter Kingsley is saying is that if you think Jung was just a scientist, just a psychologist, working diligently and objectively and very carefully not to allow himself to be seduced by these powerful archetypes in the depths of his own psyche, well you're wrong. At base, Jung's psychology is a way of reconnecting human beings with the source of consciousness itself. Peter Kingsley then goes on to talk about how his work, like Jung's, involved tracing consciousness to its very source. He explored in his other books the pre-Socratic philosophers, particularly Parmenides and Empedocles. I may not be pronouncing these correctly. I'm really not a student of ancient Greek at all. But the point that Peter Kingsley is making is that these first philosophers, the very founders of philosophy, along I suppose with Heraclitus and Pythagoras, the other great pre-Socratics, and there were many of them who launched philosophy a few hundred years before Plato and Aristotle took it to dizzying heights. But these philosophers, if you study the fragments of their writings that are left, and I guess that's all we really have at this point, are fragments. They read like poetry. They read like ritual incantations. They are the product of a kind of philosophy which is closely related to shamanism, to ritual magic, to the birth, one might say, of religion, to the idea of reconnecting humans with the very source of consciousness, the source of consciousness, the source of our being, one could say God. Of course, that's a terrible word in psychology today. You know, not so long ago, I think maybe 20 years ago, I think his name was Nicholas Cummings. He was elected president of the American Psychological Association. He proclaimed in his presidential address that the main job of American psychology must be to eradicate religion, conventional religion. But this is what Jung was up against. This is our culture. In effect, and this is a very important bottom line for Peter Kingsley, although, as I say, I haven't even finished his book. But a very important part of his book deals with Jung's visionary experiences. During his time after his breakup with Freud, when he realized if he was going to fulfill his destiny, he had to reach deep, deep, deep within himself to come face to face with the fearsome depths of the unconscious mind because he had lost his father figure. Freud was a very strong father figure for Jung. Jung, of course, was Freud's chosen heir, chosen prince. He was the designated princely heir of the Psychoanalytic Association before he had this big break with Freud. The break he had with Freud was very much on this same thing about the reality of the psyche, about whether the struggling new field of the psychology of the unconscious should be viewed as a science or as a religion. According to Peter Kingsley, Jung out and out told Freud, hey, this is a religion. What we are doing is of great religious significance, but we'll only succeed if we hide it. Peter Kingsley goes to great lengths to show that in spite of all of Jung's protestations that he was a scientist and not a mystic, you can find many, many other writings in which he is very clear from the beginning of his career right through to the end that he saw his work as prophetic, as being consistent with the work of the ancient Gnostics, and as being deeply mystical, deeply designed to reconnect modern humans with their own soul, with the depths of their being. Not in a purely scientific way, but in a way that strips us of all pretense of civilization, of culture, of humanity, that gets beneath all those layers to the basic, I guess, in a way, I think what Peter Kingsley and Jung perhaps also are suggesting is that the human being is like a volcano. The power within us is like molten lava, which is very dangerous of course, but also extremely powerful, capable of building mountains, so to speak. The only way for Jung to navigate this terrain, to enter into these religious, mystical depths, and then to communicate it to humanity as a scientist, well, the only way for him to do that is to lie about it, to say that there's nothing mystical here. I have to tell you this, Peter Kingsley harps on the fact over and over and over again that Jungians, the people who consider themselves the carriers of the tradition initiated by Carl Jung, do him a terrible disservice by insisting that, yes, he really was only a scientist, this is just modern psychology, there's nothing mystical here. I remember back in the 1970s when I was just starting to date my wife, Janelle Barlow, and she was organizing conferences. She organized a conference in Marin County in California. It was called the Many Faces of Psychology. There were many great psychologists who came to this conference, people like James Hillman, Bruno Bettelheim, I think perhaps Virginia Satir, and other leading psychologists of the era. James Hillman, who was regarded as possibly at that time the greatest living Jungian, well, here I was, a graduate student studying parapsychology. I wanted to talk to Hillman about synchronicity and the esoteric culture, astrology, the I Ching, things that Jung had written about. Hillman said to me, point blank, there's nothing mystical here, there's nothing psychic, he has no interest in any of those things. All he could do was try to discourage me from having such a conversation with him. So, when Peter Kingsley has written over and over and over again about this tendency of Jungians, of orthodox Jungians, to deny the mystical side of Jung, and he does it with a certain amount of disparaging anger, I think, as I read the book. I know that what he's saying is true, I had experienced it myself. I don't claim to be a Jungian or even that well-read in the vast Jungian literature, although I have interviewed many Jungians along the way. Some of them are clearly much more open to the mystical than James Hillman was. I interviewed people like June Singer and Jean Shinoda Bolin, who were very open to the mystical side of things. But what Kingsley is saying is that Jung was a great mystic, a great prophet, maybe the greatest, because he had a scientific training, because he understood the dynamics of the unconscious mind, because he did make an effort not to identify with himself, with the archetypes. This is another issue which is very prominent in the book Catafalque, and that is, it boils down to the word inflation, that when humans identify with these archetypal energies that are part of what you could call the objective consciousness, the very real, Jung called it the collective consciousness, the consciousness that we all swim in and share, so to speak, filled with these archetypal energies, or one could call them deities or devas or spirit beings. It's very important because they whisper to us not to identify with them, especially in a way that inflates our own ego. A true mystic has to avoid that because then we, our person, our ego gets in the way of the work to be done. Kingsley is saying that Jung, by always calling himself a scientist and nothing more, although it takes very little reading of Jung to understand that he was a great deal more than just a scientist, but by saying that, and even by his followers saying that, it allowed him to maintain this kind of nondescript, everybody can relate to a scientist in our culture, that's not problematic, relating to a prophet is very problematic, because even the followers of prophets get caught up in ego inflation. Ego inflation is always the enemy of true mysticism. Now, Peter Kingsley seems to be suggesting that humanity itself is in grave danger, because ever since Plato tried to dismiss the ancient gods of Homer and set humanity on a rationalistic footing, we have lost touch with the need, the desire, the value of being in touch with the source of our own being. I don't mean in a way of saying, well, I'm a member of the Masons, or I'm a good Catholic, or a good Protestant, or a good Jew, so I know about God. No. Or even, you know, I'm deeply involved in esoteric culture. One of the great strengths, and what really moved me reading Peter Kingsley's book, is over and over and over again he comes back to the ways in which we can trap ourselves through a kind of pride we might take in whatever it is we're doing. Because we pride ourselves on our various accomplishments, we lose sight of how much further we could go, and grow, and be. And yet, and here's the paradox, this is the paradox, Peter Kingsley is also saying if we just let the unconscious do its own work and work through us, or as he might say, let the gods express themselves through us, everything will be taken care of. Then he goes so far as to say, well, you know what, it's already being taken care of. Of course, the unconscious is taking care of everything. But I think he's also saying, although I haven't read it explicitly yet, that it's our egos, our inflated egos that get in the way every time. He seems to be saying about Western culture in general, that it is doomed, that Jung saw that it was doomed. We are heading like lemmings heading to a cliff into the ocean. Western culture, centuries of valuable Western culture, the art, the music, the science, the architecture, the technology, it's all doomed. The reason Peter Kingsley seems to think it's doomed is because we've lost touch with the essential mission of humanity. That essential mission is somehow related to the true mission of Jungian psychology to reconnect us with our deepest depths. Now, I want to share with you just one personal experience as I was reading Peter Kingsley's book. Well, naturally it stirred up a lot within me. I can tell you this, I have reached out to Peter Kingsley. I hope to have him on this channel. In a way, this monologue is somehow a kind of preparation for that. Because if we're doomed, maybe there's something we can do about it. At least, minimally speaking, let's not be blind to it. Let's keep our eyes open. Maybe even there's time and the possibility of turning things around. Peter Kingsley, on many occasions, refers to Jung as the savior of humanity, the savior, a figure like Jesus Christ, Almighty, and maybe even greater. Yet, at the same time, I hear Peter Kingsley criticizing Jungians who say, no, he was a scientist, but they worship him like a religious figure. I think Peter Kingsley is saying, you don't need to worship religious figures. That's not what they're there for. Don't worship Jung. Don't try and follow in his footsteps. Let Jung's footsteps lead you to your own footsteps. I was having these thoughts and it dawned on me, what is Peter Kingsley saying? It occurred to me he's saying something about initiation. There was a moment and I was in bed. I was lying in my bed, half asleep almost, and it dawned on me, Peter Kingsley is really saying that we can reach deep within ourselves, that we can initiate ourselves. Well, I don't think you can do it just by saying it. But at that moment, I felt like I could. All sorts of things were bubbling up for me at that time, deep, unspoken thoughts about my relationships with various people, things that needed healing, things that could never be expressed in words but needed to be communicated with other people, that that could be done on the inner planes. I could initiate myself to doing that because I saw the need for it. There's very little more I can say about this right now because it's very personal. It really is my business. It's nobody else's business actually. I don't think I need to talk about it any further. But to say that there's a moment that may come in the life of each and every person, maybe in the lives of those of you who are viewing these videos, and I know many of you have now viewed dozens, even hundreds. We have actually over a thousand videos I've put on this channel since it started four years ago. A moment may come in your life when you can initiate yourself, and you will know it and you will do it. Until that moment comes, these words may sound hollow and empty to you. If they sound hollow and empty to you right now, that's fine. It's perfectly appropriate. It's healthy to be skeptical about it. But hold on to these words. Put them in a box somewhere in the back of your mind. The time may come when the box will open itself and you'll know that it's time for you to initiate yourself into another level of your own consciousness that's always been there waiting for you. But you don't get much support from it in this culture, in this culture that denies the importance of a great thinker like Carl Jung, and even for people who are his devoted followers. I mean, there's an army of Jungian therapists out there and, according to Peter Kingsley, many if not most of them want to deny still the mystical side of Jung. I think that's probably less true today, hopefully because of influences such as the New Thinking Allowed channel. So, those are my preliminary thoughts about the book. I want to say one more thing for those of you who are thinking about getting the book. It's expensive, it's $75 if you buy a new copy, but it's two volumes. The first volume is the book itself and volume two is all the footnotes because the book was incredibly well researched. Peter Kingsley makes a point of documenting, page by page, all of the significant and profound ideas that are riddled throughout this book. You could say it's a book of riddles in many ways. Let me leave you with those thoughts and thank you for being with me.