“I can only gaze with wonder and awe at the depths and heights of our psychic nature. Its non-spatial universe conceals an untold abundance of images which have accumulated over millions of years of living development and become fixed in the organism. My consciousness is like an eye that penetrates to the most distant spaces, yet it is the psychic non-ego that fills them with non-spatial images. And these images are not pale shadows, but tremendously powerful psychic factors. The most we may be able to do is misunderstand them, but we can never rob them of their power by denying them. Beside this picture I would like to place the spectacle of the starry heavens at night, for the only equivalent of the universe within is the universe without; and just as I reach this world through the medium of the body, so I reach that world through the medium of the psyche.”
~ C.G. Jung1
I love the note of awe with which Jung speaks of the psyche in this passage. It is so important to recognize this aspect of Jung’s work: the sense of awe, dread, and wonder — all those responses that belong to the encounter with the numinous — in the face of that inexhaustible mystery that is human existence. “The psyche,” he writes elsewhere, “is part of the inmost mystery of life.”2
And this is essential to the understanding of the symbolic life, as well. The symbolic life, as I’ve said before, is both a recognition of the larger life of meaning in which our everyday lives are embedded and by which they are nourished, and it is a practice that brings us into contact with that life of meaning.
It is a central principle in Jungian analysis, for instance, that an important component of healing involves the capacity to discover the symbol in the symptom. Now, this does not mean that the painful experience of the symptom is not real or is some kind of illusion. Rather, it means that our personal experiences gain meaning, and even purpose, if we can recognize them as expressions of archetypal — that is to say, universally human — struggles. And this, in a sense, means seeing the “universe without” in connection with the “universe within.”
As the Jungian analyst Jolande Jacobi puts it, when we recognize this deeper dimension of our symptoms then, “The individual, who hitherto has been caught in his [or her] personal entanglements, is then confronted with a problem which no longer represents solely [a] personal conflict but gives expression to a conflict that it has been incumbent on [human beings] to suffer and solve from time immemorial.”3
In a similar vein, but speaking from the standpoint of the religious attitude, Evelyn Underhill, in her book Mysticism speaks about the “eye which looks upon Time.” When this eye, she writes, “usurps the conscious field, that spiritual eye which ‘looks upon Eternity’ can hardly act at all.”4
This distinction of these two kinds of “eyes” — one that looks upon time and one that looks upon eternity — is a helpful image for understanding the difference between what is meant when we speak of the personal and the archetypal levels of experience. The use of different images like this is necessary because we are talking about a very subtle experience that can’t be directly described, but only experienced. As Jung says, “the most we may be able to do is misunderstand” it because no concept can finally capture what is a far-reaching idea — that the human being is a kind of threshold between two equally important realms of experience: the universe without and the universe within.
To be sure, for most of us, the physical universe without dominates and the “non-spatial universe” within is hardly recognized — until, that is, it manifests in symptomatic form. An essential component of the symbolic life is the recognition that there is a reciprocal relationship between these two universes. The more conscious our relationship to the “universe within” becomes, the deeper and more meaningful we will find our experience of the “universe without.” Absent the inner world, we become lost in the outer.
As Edward Edinger declares, “The symbolic life in some form is a prerequisite for psychic health. Without it the ego is alienated from its suprapersonal source and falls victim to a kind of cosmic anxiety.”5
Until next time.
C.G. Jung, Introduction to Kranefeldt’s ‘Secret Ways of the Mind’ (CW4, par. 764)
C.G. Jung, Psychological Aspects of the Mother Archetype (CW9i, par. 187)
Jolande Jacobi, Complex / Archetype / Symbol in the Psychology of C.G. Jung, p. 26
Evelyn Underhill, Mysticism, p. ???
Edward Edinger, Ego and Archetype, p. 117
When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer
BY WALT WHITMAN
When I heard the learn’d astronomer,
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,
When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,
When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,
Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.
Thank you, Jason, for weaving words through this invisible tapestry of eternity and linear time, the universe without and the universe within. As I reach into the world(s) you describe, I realize that I am always walking on the invisible Ground of timelessness and time. Our culture invites us into the attractive and seemingly inescapable web of linear time, the realm of the ego. Perhaps I've mentioned that as a Christian, I've gone spelunking into the Nicene Creed, the dogmatic "meaning" of the person who manifests as both human and divine. This 3rd and 4th definition of Person and Persons (perichoresis or circumincession) points us into the dancing non-dual landscape of consciousness. This exploration blossomed for me as the recent book, "My Dear Far-Nearness: The Holy Trinity as Spiritual Practice" (Orbis, 2022). Check it out and let me know how you would weave Jung's world view into this perichoresis. Blessings, Jonas