Your Neurosis, a Low-Intensity Religious Experience*

“Jung’s studies and work led him to conclude that the unconscious is the real source…" Robert Johnson

Jungian psychologist and author, Robert Johnson writes about many things in his book, Inner Work. Most importantly he details the value of the ‘inner world’ of individuals. The inner world as he describes it follows along the ideas of his mentor psychologist Carl Jung who defined the term: the ‘secret inner life we all lead, by day and by night, in constant companionship with our unseen, unconscious self." Johnson, like Jung, makes considered value of these associations, the conscious, the unconscious, dreams, rituals and something he calls active imagination.

“Jung’s studies and work led him to conclude that the unconscious is the real source of all our human conscious… reasoning, awareness, and feeling. The unconscious is the Original Mind, the primal matrix... Every feature of our functioning consciousness was first contained in the unconscious and then found its way from there… The conscious mind reflects the wholeness of the total self… this [is] a storehouse of raw energy assimilates into the personality… the true depth and grandeur of an individual human being is never totally manifested until the main elements of the personality are moved from the level of potential (meaning more at ‘possibility’) in the unconscious… [to] the level of conscious functioning.”

Jung observes about the inner life: the unconscious, when in balance with the conscious mind lives in relationship to one another. However the disaster in this view is that the modern world has completed “the splitting off of the conscious mind from its roots in the unconscious.” Thus all the forms that nourished earlier generations such as dreams, vision, ritual, imagination and religious experience are lost, dismissed by the modern mind as base or superstitious. What’s left? Many seek to fill the void with a ‘conscious consumerism,’ fed by big business, they fixate on the physical, the external, material world.

Still the inner world strives to make itself known. Many have contact with this form of knowledge through the recollection of dreams. While dreams are not taken literally in Jung’s view, they are, however, powerful imaginings and symbols pointing the way; thus the dream is a portrait of the dreamer. They are influential reporters of our behaviors, whose origins are from within. And “curiously people resist their good qualities even more emphatically than they resist facing their negative qualities,” writes Johnson. Dreams “constantly speak to us about our beliefs, and attitudes.”

Moving from dream work to the place of ritual is part of the process Jung describes as a function of making the unconscious individual. Ritual is a most important tool with great energy to bridge the difference between the paradox of opposites. It ties our divided selves together. In the West, Johnson says, there is a great urge to make everything abstract, to use intellectual discussion alone in substitution for concrete, direct, feeling experiences. When emotions are registered physically and concretely, they register at the deepest places of the psyche.
Another important point Johnson brings up is that of common sense. While imagination is a useful and valid part of conscious reckoning;its content and origin are produced uniquely within the self. Many conduct themselves without common sense. Not everything one imagines is to be acted upon. Some things are just for contemplation. Through thoughtful consideration, the distinction between the active and contemplative becomes apparent.
The Hindu master Sri Aurobindo once said, “Why is it that when people first relinquish the world (worldliness), the first thing they relinquish is common sense?” Courtesy and respect of others remain important community values.

* As for Neurosis, Jungian analysis sees this as a situation where unconscious motives are expressed in ways that do not directly serve the person; they may actually be detrimental imbalances to the self. How? For more information: This is a long discussion contained within the book, Inner Work by Robert Johnson, and also many prior references by Carl Jung in his writings.

The Divine Puppet Show

"Physical freedom means that there is nothing to hinder me from acting as I choose to act." Augustine: On Free Choice and the Will, translated, edited by Thomas Williams

As a vital current in Western thought, the subject of freedom and will are no small issues. From ancient times, the thoughts of Aristotle, philosopher, influenced theologian Augustine of Hippo to write a slim, but in-depth treatise on this subject. While only 129 pages, one is likely to read parts of it again and again. Thomas Williams makes an English translation of Augustine: On Free Choice of the Will, noting that this one discourse, more than any other by Augustine of Hippo contains all his essential points including freedom, will, human nature, deity, ethics and more.

On freedom, Williams records Augustine's thought as sorting through the many senses of the word. For example, one sort of freedom may be the lack of restraint; another may be construed: since I am not in prison, I may, for example, leave at any time. This is physical freedom. On the other hand, Augustine notes there is also a freedom which he calls metaphysical freedom. It is this freedom which his treatise mostly concerns itself.

Metaphysical freedom is said to be 'deterministic.' Determinism states that for every choice I make, there are multiple and often competing alternatives, including prior states of the universe over which I have no control. While I may be physically free, not tied up or otherwise prevented from movement, I seem to lack freedom in a more urgent, vital regard. For example, I am free to do my own choosing, but the choices themselves are not with liberty (I can for example, choose in an emergency situation to crash my car into the car suddenly in my lane speeding towards me, the lane with cars traveling in the opposite direction, or into a large tree in an effort to save myself). The freedom to choose something that is accomplished in a way so as to be un-determined by anything beyond my personal control is called metaphysical freedom.

Metaphysical freedom is a philosophical position that places human beings in a libertarian position. While this idea of Libertarianism enjoyed its heyday, nowadays many philosophers follow a more existential route, and no more consider human freedom in terms of Libertarianism. Today it is fashionable to enshrine the limits of human freedom within the physical realm. Augustine however is, and remains, a great defender of the Libertarian point of view. It is chiefly this view which he, as a theologian, brings into the Catholic Christian church. According to this view, human beings are endowed with an energy he calls, the will.

As the commander of our self, we may roam wherever; there is free choice. All options may, at times, be considered: the good, the bad, the indifferent. The will is unaffected by external factors. Only the will can itself determine to choose. This freedom allows us responsibility for our actions alone; more often however, it's internal issues which provoke our choices of will. Things such as feeling, desire, fears, and wishes are what the will factors from within. As for causal events, one cannot have control, nor over that which occurred prior to one's birth, so Augustine also and finally rejects Compatabilism and Determinism in favor of  Metaphysical Freedom alone as prime.

Due to our metaphysical freedom, we are therefore able to make real change in the world, real contact with the physical, the rule of nature. To some extent, we write our own scripts, live a life, play our own role in the "divine puppet show." So what does this have to do with Simple Mind or Zen? Everything. If we view the world as actors or as re-actors, there imputes great influence upon our social and spiritual lives; our view directs and influences our senses, responsibility and our mental states. Our fault-finding and base assumptions start here as well. It is the cornerstone of every conscious action undertaken, argues Augustine.