The Collective Unconscious Is Not a Thing

 

Lived Experience

People have trouble understanding me when I say my poems are not autobiographical. We have this unfortunate fixed idea that poems should be autobiographical. For some reason, we do not have this problem when discussing prose, or plays. 

So recently I was asked if the voices in my poems come from the collective unconscious. I dismissed the suggestion. Someone else suggested that I am “channelling.” 

Jung’s concept of a collective unconscious seems to me to describe a real thing—a very real thing—but to be a contradiction in terms as he frames it. He sees it as something of which we are by definition unconscious. This is nonsensical as an epistemological statement. How then can we discuss it? He further defines it as a part of our self that is not our self; that is, it exists apart from our awareness, experience, or will, just as a tree might exist in the next lot. How then is it part of us, and the tree is not? A collective unconscious defies the very definition of self.

And Jung so far as I can tell offers no rational mechanism for how such a thing as a collective memory can exist. How can you inherit someone else’s memories? 

Jung’s problem, I maintain, is that he is trying to give a materialist explanation for a spiritual reality. He is trying to reconcile actual human experience with a purely materialist, scientistic world view. In the end, he cannot.

The thing he calls “collective unconscious” is better framed by Plato as simply the real world. In the real world everything exists in its perfect, ideal form. Were this not so, were we not pre-programmed, we could never make any sense of our sense experiences. 

See Plato’s cave analogy.

Or his dialogue “Meno”:

“ … SOCRATES: What do you say of him, Meno? Were not all these answers given out of his own head?

MENO: Yes, they were all his own.

SOCRATES: And yet, as we were just now saying, he did not know?

MENO: True.

SOCRATES: But still he had in him those notions of his—had he not?

MENO: Yes.

SOCRATES: Then he who does not know may still have true notions of that which he does not know?

MENO: He has.

SOCRATES: And at present these notions have just been stirred up in him, as in a dream; but if he were frequently asked the same questions, in different forms, he would know as well as any one at last?

MENO: I dare say.

SOCRATES: Without anyone teaching him he will recover his knowledge for himself, if he is only asked questions?

MENO: Yes.

SOCRATES: And this spontaneous recovery of knowledge in him is recollection?

MENO: True.

SOCRATES: And this knowledge which he now has must he not either have acquired or always possessed?

MENO: Yes.

SOCRATES: But if he always possessed this knowledge he would always have known; or if he has acquired the knowledge he could not have acquired it in this life, unless he has been taught geometry; for he may be made to do the same with all geometry and every other branch of knowledge. Now, has any one ever taught him all this? You must know about him, if, as you say, he was born and bred in your house.

MENO: And I am certain that no one ever did teach him.

SOCRATES: And yet he has the knowledge?

MENO: The fact, Socrates, is undeniable.

SOCRATES: But if he did not acquire the knowledge in this life, then he must have had and learned it at some other time?

MENO: Clearly he must.

SOCRATES: Which must have been the time when he was not a man?

MENO: Yes.

SOCRATES: And if there have been always true thoughts in him, both at the time when he was and was not a man, which only need to be awakened into knowledge by putting questions to him, his soul must have always possessed this knowledge, for he always either was or was not a man?

MENO: Obviously.

SOCRATES: And if the truth of all things always existed in the soul, then the soul is immortal. Wherefore be of good cheer, and try to recollect what you do not know, or rather what you do not remember….”

The truth of all things always existed in the soul. Or as Blake put it, “man is born as a garden fully planted.” This is where poetry comes from. Memories are not formed by our experiences any more than our experiences are formed by our memories.

This truth is pretty universally understood, except by the modern West, blinded by the limited world view of materialism.

The Buddhists refer to this as the “storehouse consciousness.” Coleridge referred to it as the “primary imagination.” It is the basic assumption of all Native North American spiritualities. Ironically, everyone thinks they were deeply connected to nature. In fact, they saw nature as an illusion, and only the spirit world as real.

In Christian terms, this is the Kingdom of Heaven. Or rather, this is the entire objectively existing spiritual world, heaven, hell, and purgatory.

As to channeling: there are beings speaking to us from this spiritual world. Angels, saints, fairies, demons—literally and necessarily anything we can imagine. 

The problem is, some of them are demons. Channeling without caution tends to attract demons.

Truth and beauty are the test of the spirits. Are the words, is the image, beautiful? Not in a superficial sense, but does it evoke the aesthetic experience of awe? Is it, are they, true?

Bingo. Poetry.

What Is Real?

 

"Everything you can imagine is real”—Picasso

This quote appears on the cover of the latest issue of Verse Afire, a Canadian poetry journal.

The observation is self-evidently true. 

If you imagine a unicorn, for example, said unicorn is necessarily real, or you could not imagine it. The only question is whether it exists as a physical entity, or a spiritual entity: sensed, or imagined.

This is also the fastest and simplest proof of God: if he did not exist, you could not formulate the statement “Does God exist?” The question automatically answers itself.

You may object that by “exist,” you mean, does the thing exist independent of me thinking about it? Is its existence purely subjective?

Yes, God exists apart from your thinking about him, and unicorns exist apart from your thinking about them. Otherwise, when you say “God” or “unicorn,” your listeners would not know what you mean. Yet they immediately do. Moreover, you can stop thinking about unicorns, or God, and then, the next time you think of them, there they are again. It is just the same as with that chestnut tree down the street: you know that it exists objectively because others also see it, and because you can turn and look away, then look back, and it is still there. So too with unicorns.

In sum, the idea that things you imagine are not real is a primitive materialist superstition

Wokeness Defined

 

The essence of CRT/CT, postmodernism, “wokeness,” can be expressed in one simple statement: “Reality is a function of belief.” I think that is Kierkegaard’s formulation. Or here is William Blake’s: “A firm persuasion that a thing is so, makes it so.”

There, I defined it; and the left claims nobody can. 

So, say the woke, there is no truth; there is only “your truth.” There are no rules, no right and wrong; only a need to impose your own preferred reality on others. As in, demanding they use your pronouns.

Men declaring themselves women is the currently fashionable test case. If it looks relatively harmless, just wait for what comes next.

I have been hearing versions of this dogma—dogma is the word—since undergraduate days back in the 1970s. It took decades for me to fully shake this off, if I even have. One must not, in any circumstances, be “judgemental.” One must not get “hung up” on “meaning,” as one prize postgrad essay in religion asserted. Marcuse was hot back then: “Beware: even the ears have walls,” as one graffito said during the Paris uprisings. This idea has been drilled into our young people now for perhaps 3.5 generations.

The idea is attractive to the young. Sensitive or intelligent young people must realize that “there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in your philosophy”—that philosophy being the dominant materialism. Postmodernism seems to offer the response, segueing nicely from LSD: we are not limited to the material, but can live entirely in our imaginations.

Heck, it even seems to be endorsed by the Christian tradition: Blake and Kierkegaard were, or considered themselves, Christians. Jesus said  “if you have faith as a mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move; and nothing will be impossible for you.” (Matthew 17:20). Martin Luther emphasized faith as both necessary and sufficient for salvation: the whole ball game.

But there is something critical missing in the postmodern formulation: God. The faith spoken of by Jesus, or Blake, or Kierkegaard, is not faith in self or in the will. That’s Hitler.  It is faith in God.

Consider the traditional solipsist conundrum: “If a tree falls I the forest, and no one is there to hear, did it make a sound?”

And the necessary answer is, it makes a sound because God knows. God is the touchstone of all existence, the ground of being. Without faith in God, as Descartes, for one, explained. one has no warrant that anything else is real. It is then possible, as Chesterton pointed out, to randomly believe in anything.  Madness is inevitable, the only alternative to such faith. 

Accordingly, if God says a mountain will move, it must move. If he says it will move at your command, it will move at your command. Because God. Nothing else is or is anything here or there except because God.  But this magic works if and only if you are following God’s will, not your own.

And, of course, it is generally God’s will that a mountain be where he put it.

In denying God, we are collectively pulling the plug on everything. It is mass madness, and it is the madness of the proverbial lemmings.

The Promised Land

 

Heb 11:1-2, 8-19:

Brothers and sisters: Faith is the realization of what is hoped for and evidence of things not seen. Because of it the ancients were well attested.

By faith Abraham obeyed when he was called to go out to a place that he was to receive as an inheritance; he went out, not knowing where he was to go. 

By faith he sojourned in the promised land as in a foreign country, dwelling in tents with Isaac and Jacob, heirs of the same promise; for he was looking forward to the city with foundations, whose architect and maker is God.

By faith he received power to generate, even though he was past the normal age—and Sarah herself was sterile—for he thought that the one who had made the promise was trustworthy.

So it was that there came forth from one man, himself as good as dead, descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky and as countless as the sands on the seashore.

All these died in faith.

They did not receive what had been promised but saw it and greeted it from afar and acknowledged themselves to be strangers and aliens on earth, for those who speak thus show that they are seeking a homeland.

If they had been thinking of the land from which they had come, they would have had opportunity to return.

But now they desire a better homeland, a heavenly one.

Therefore, God is not ashamed to be called their God, for he has prepared a city for them.

This was the second reading at last Sunday’s mass. The motto of the Order of Canada, “they desire a better country,” comes from the antepenultimate line.

Ironically, the “better country” referred to is clearly heaven. Not Canada. And anyone who supposes Canada is the goal is scorned here as without faith. “If they had been thinking of the land from which they had come, they would have had opportunity to return.” The goal is no earthly 

The passage points out that the things God promised to the patriarchs of the Old Testament did not come true during their lifetimes. So did he break his promise? Should they care about what happens to others after their death?

They did, and they accepted the promises, because they considered themselves aliens on earth. This is the essence of faith; as defined in the first lines here. “The realization of what is hoped for, and evidence of things not seen.”

Their true home was the eternal; which is among us at all times as the imagination, and in which we live forever. This is the “promised land” or land of promise.

Through the Looking Glass

 

Carl Jung hypothesized a “collective unconscious” of shared memories. And he had compelling evidence for it: certain recognizable figures appear in cultures world-wide, as well as spontaneously in our dreams, or in the delusions of the mad. Every culture has the notion of the dragon, a large winged serpent. It generally figures large in their legends. Yet there are no dragons in nature. Every culture has witches. Every lake of any size hosts a lake monster. East and West both know of unicorns, not just as shy beasts with a single horn that appear out of the forests, but as creatures with an unrelenting sense of right and wrong. When they went about conquering the known world, the Greeks and then the Romans had no problem identifying their own gods one by one with those of Egypt, or India, or Germany, or Carthage.

This begs explanation. Yet a “collective unconscious” of shared memories does not work. Nobody has a memory of actually seeing a dragon—let alone all of us. How can we have memories of things that never happened?

Being a pseudo-scientist, Jung explained it all as springing from the physiology of the brain. But that does not work. Why should any synapse express itself as a unicorn? 

There is a simpler explanation: that the imagination is not random, but is an organ which gives us glimpses of a real, objectively existing, realm. 

Moderns have trouble accepting this, because our religion of “scientism” is uncompromisingly materialistic. It insists, a priori, that only what is apparent to the physical senses is “real.” But this is an arbitrary, and ultimately nonsensical, position. A thing is real if it exists independent of any individual perception of it; and “perception” is a much broader category than sense perception. If not, then truth or justice are not real either, are they?

Just as truth or justice exist, then, a realm exists that we perceive with our imagination. We do not create what is there; we perceive it. 

Any serious artist knows this is so. Michelangelo, for example, claimed he did not design his sculptures. He started chipping away to discover what was hidden in the marble. Stephen King explains that he never outlines before he begins to write. He writes to find out what happens. He compares it to excavating dinosaur bones. The story already exists; his hope is to get it all intact. Leonard Cohen speaks of keeping “the equipment” in working order, in case something comes.

Fairyland is a real place. This is why all fairy tales are broadly similar: you are not allowed to make anything up. Shakespeare, moreover, presents it as where all mortal problems are solved; it is his “green world.” 

Plato proposes it as where all ideas come from. We would never be able to organize our random sense impressions into the concept “giraffe” or “morning” had these concepts not already existed in our minds. They indeed come to us like memories. 

This fairyland / collective unconscious / realm of ideal forms is, then, more perfect than and prior to the physical world. We see it in our dreams, and in art.

It is here that we find heaven and hell. And there is every reason to suppose that we will continue to exist in it after the carnival big top we call life has folded and moved on.

The Uses of Enchantment

 

William Blake's illustration to "A Midsummer Night's Dream"

Northrop Frye realized that Shakespeare’s comedies and romances always featured a “green world,” in which the hero finds himself, one way or another, in about Act Three. In it the protagonist’s problems all are solved, to produce the play’s happy ending. It should not be necessary here to enumerate all the examples; Frye has cited them for us.

A valuable insight, but Frye was not all that smart. He then identified this “green world” with nature and with fertility rituals.

But the “green world” is never natural. Sometimes it is forested; but it can as well be Belmont, Portia’s castle. It is, rather, supernatural, which is the very opposite of natural. Think of Prospero’s island in The Tempest. The one consistent feature is that magic happens there. It is generally populated by fairies. It is fairyland.

Where is fairyland? Not out in the physical woods or wilds; in the imagination, in the forests of the night. It is the place where dreams and stories come from.

Shakespeare is the world’s greatest psychologist. His ability to see and express the motivations of his various characters is legendary; only Dostoyevsky comes close. And he is saying here that the cure for spiritual problems or for life problems—for “mental” problems—is the land of story, of art, of “play,” of the imagination.

He explains in Hamlet that art “holds the mirror up to nature.” But he does not mean nature in the sense of the physical world where man is absent. He means human nature. Read the full quotation:

“playing, whose end, both at the first and now, was and is, to hold as 'twere the mirror up to nature: to show virtue her feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure.”

Art shows virtue, scorn, and the zeitgeist; not bugs or trees.

Beyond his own plays with their “green world,” Shakespeare is pointing here to the value of fairy tales as a cure for spiritual disorders.

“The play’s the thing/With which to catch the conscience of the king.”

We ought to listen to him. 

Musical Meditations

 

Feeling feverish and incoherent today. I suspect COVID, which complicates my reservation for a booster shot. I guess that’s not happening. Real life sucks.

Unable to sleep last night, I began playing my favourites list of YouTube music videos. Not necessarily my favourite songs: this is a category reserved for music I love that does not fit under some broader classification.

First up. Elvis Presley, “His Latest Flame,” with a selection of shuffle-dancing babes. I love rhythm. Early rock and roll is great for rhythm; later rock lost it, and lost my interest. I also cannot get enough of watching beautiful girls shuffle dance. “His Latest Flame” is based around a simple endless two-note riff. I could listen to it forever. My brother Gerry used to scorn rock and roll as too simple. That’s just what I like about it.

Next up, Madonna singing “Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina.” Rather the opposite. The Webber melody is no doubt complex enough to satisfy my brother. The lyrics, too, are dense, and there’s not much rhythm. Tim Rice is clearly influenced by W.S. Gilbert, of Gilbert and Sullivan. But he uses erudition not for comic effect but, here, to express a philosophical world-view in verse. This strikes me as a fantastically hard thing to do, and deserves some kind of award. He also deserves an award for making Madonna relatable. I’m impressed at a rhyme of “existence” with “distance,” “illusions” with “solutions,” or the line. “All dressed to the nines/ At sixes and sevens with you.’ 

 “The Sidewalks of New York” – three versions; none of them quite hits the mark. My grandmother used to sing this to me, and it can sometimes evoke tears. The lost world of childhood—hers more than mine.

W.C. Handy, “St. Louis Blues.” This is a purely instrumental version performed by the composer himself. I love the tone of world-weariness. Sad music is cathartic. The blues is eternal.

Playing for Change, “Guantanamera.” I’m crazy for rhythm. I love Latin rhythms. I love the format of Playing for Change, picking up participants across the world. The words do not make much sense, and are in Spanish, but there is great strength in that simple refrain, 

“Guantanamera, guajira guantanamera

Guantanamera, guajira guantanamera.”

Guantanamo girl. Guantanamo country girl.

I know what he means.

A simple cry of aching appreciation for random beauty. This is not a love song; he does not know her name. The verses make sense as a spontaneous meditation on what he could possibly say to this girl, knowing nothing of her. 

“I am an honest man from the land of palms…”

“My thoughts are light green, yet burning incarnadine.”

She is his muse. Perhaps she is everyone’s muse; beauty itself.

Norah Jones, “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?” I do not like modern jazz. I find it pretentious, emotionally superficial, and self-indulgent. Yet I love the vocal stylings of Norah Jones, Willie Nelson, or Diana Krall. When their jazz cool is used on a song with deep emotional tones, the counterpoint is painfully beautiful.

Yo-Yo Ma, Kathryn Stott, “Over the Rainbow.” I’m not big on show tunes as a rule, because they usually seem canned and artificial. But this one speaks of a deep universal yearning. It is in the end the yearning for heaven that each of us is born with. This version is instrumental, and seems even better for it, given that the words are in my head. The imagined song is more perfect tha the song heard with the ear.

Emmylou Harris, “Spanish is a Loving Tongue.” The lyrics are the main attraction here. They started out as a stand-alone cowboy poem, and it is a fine example of the genre. Harris, being a woman, must sing it in the third person. But that seems worth it for the sake of her beautiful country voice.

The Highwaymen, “City of New Orleans.” Willie Nelson is singing on this one, and the others strumming. The lyrics are finely crafted. But this is another rhythm song. It is the rhythm of the rails; you can almost feel them rumbling ‘neath the floor.

I have no connection with this part of the world—the American Midwest, and down the Mississippi. I don’t have wide experience with trains, other than watching them pass by for hours without me on them. But I can almost feel I am there. A perfect slice of Americana.

Willie Nelson with Paula Nelson, “Have You Ever Seen the Rain?” A beautiful black-and-white atmospheric video. I love the song in its apocalyptic simplicity. I think it was the plainness of Creedence Clearwater in particular over which my jazz-loving sibling and I differed. Willie’s cool voice feels like the cool rain falling. 

Jordan Bickhart, “Brownsville Girl.” Dylan’s songs are usually better performed by someone else. It is not that he has a bad voice, so much as that he abuses it and goofs around. I think it is because he finds the songs too emotionally meaningful, too revealing.

“Brownsville Girl” has almost no melody; it is a tone poem. Not a rhyming poem either; blank verse. There is a narrative, but disjointed. A lot of it is just Western atmospherics. There ought to be little to hang your hat on here, but not so—Dylan deserved his Nobel Prize for Literature. He knows the trick of associating images, the same trick that made Yeats’s later poems so great.

The Brownsville girl makes the narrator think of Western movies, which fade in and out of his own remembered life. This is what she was to him: some promise of heroic perfection, somewhere over the rainbow, or across the Mexican line.

Like “Guantanamera,” it is mostly a coyote howl at the moon of beauty, always visible but just out of reach: 

“Brownsville girl

with your Brownsville curls, 

teeth like pearls 

shining like the moon above

Brownsville girl

Show me all around the world, 

Brownsville girl, 

you're my honey love.”

Deliberately not polished poetry. Just one man trying to express the universal feeling in his heart. The incoherence is part of the point. We are here, and do not understand. Man is in love, and loves what vanishes.

That’s the way I feel today.