Carl Jung, balance and individuation

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One of Jung’s (many!) insights was the drive to find balance from which to individuate; to grow fully into our potential. Balance is dynamic, and between different dimensions within each of us, and between us. Three of these dimensions have been popularised by Katherine Briggs and her daughter Isobel Myers with the Myers-Briggs Personality Test and Typology. These are , Thinking-Feeling and Sensing-Intuition.

Carl Jung. Dynamic Balance and Individuation
These are discussed in Jung’s book – “Psychological Types”. However Jung saw these as fluid states rather than ways of categorising people. He did not agree with Briggs and Myers. Rather weare, each of us, a complex of each of the 16 MBTI typologies.

It is balance between these states that we should seek as we change and grow. If we express too much of one aspect, this sets up a force pulling us toward the other. For instance if we spend too much time extroverted then we develop a need to spend time alone ( and vice versa). As Jung says:

”Identification with one particular function at once produces a tension of opposites. The more compulsive the one-sidedness, and the more untamed the libido which streams off to one side, the more daemonic it becomes” Carl Jung on Psychological Types

It is not that we all should aim for some kind of grey average at the centre of each of the dimensions. Rather, the opposite. Jung saw our whole purpose as what he called “individuation”; within which there is a search for increasingly anuthentic expression of our true Self. This involves bringing to consciousness knowledge of that which is within us, and its connection to the transpersonal. This is anything but some kind of dumbing down. Indeed..

“A conscious capacity for one-sidedness is a sign of the highest culture, but involuntary one-sidedness, i.e., the inability to be anything but one-sided, is a sign of barbarism” Carl Jung, Collected Works

Martin Buber, love and dialogue

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The great existentialist philosopher – Martin Buber – speaks about dialogue and distinguishes it from love. I have included some quotes at the end of this note from his 1929 essay “Zwiesprache” (Dialogue) below, together with a short note about Buber and Jesus.

I think that love and dialogue are closely intertwined ..

Genuine dialogue is about meeting, arising from mutual awareness. This can happen even as two strangers glance at each other in passing. Perhaps this is what Jesus meant by “Love thy neighbour as thyself”; that is, become as fully aware of and in sympathy with your neighbour as you are with yourself.

Is this not a call to dialogue, which is after all a direct way to become fully aware of our neighbour. A deep awareness which is a form of mindfulness. A mind full of the other and thus a way to expand your horizon.

This sharing of horizons is really a form of love itself. A Love which (I believe) underlies all of creation.

As Pierre Teilhard de Chardin says

“Joy is the infallible sign of the presence of God”.

Buber quotes

Three types of dialogue. In his 1929 essay Buber describes dialogue as genuine meeting with full awareness. He developed this later (I and Thou,1937) into a whole philosophy of relation; where all meaning is contained in the relationship between (zwischen) people and the “other”. Here is the first quote:

“There is genuine dialogue – no matter whether spoken or silent – where each of the participants really has in mind the other or others in their present and particular being and turns to them with the intention of establishing a living mutual relation between himself and them. There is technical dialogue, which is prompted solely by the need for objective understanding. And there is monologue disguised as dialogue, in which two or more men, meeting in space, speak each with himself in strangely tortuous and circuitous ways and yet imagine they have escaped the torment of being thrown back on their own resources.”

Dialogue and love. In the second quote he distinguishes between dialogue and love:

“I know no one in any time who has succeeded in loving every man he met. Even Jesus obviously loved of “sinners” only the loose, lovable sinners, sinners against the Law; not those who were settled and loyal to their inheritance and sinned against him and his message. Yet to the latter as to the former he stood in a direct relation. Dialogic is not be identified with love. But love without dialogic, without real outgoing to the other, reaching to the other, and company in with the other, the love remaining with itself – this is called Lucifer”

Buber, Zionism and Jesus. Buber was an intellectual Hasidic Jew. He was a lifelong Zionist, but who strongly disagreed with how the new state was constituted. He thus refused to become the first president of Israel. He “favored a binational state that encompassed and honored both Jewish and Arab ethnicities, and centred on mutual love and respect. He believed that Jesus was the greatest of all Jews and that his message was the flower of judaism. He describes Jesus thus:

“from my youth onwards I have found in Jesus my great brother”

T

Eric Berne and Transaction Analysis

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Eric Berne brought Freudian thinking into everyday use; much as Myers and Briggs did for Carl Jung’s typology. He observed that we can understand our own and other people’s ego-states through our interactions with each other. He liked our interplay to a series of “transactions”, which we can then think about. His seminal book was “The Games People Play”, and it is extremely accessible.

His ideas have some overlap with Cognitive Behaviour Therapy (CBT), in that he made a “contract” with patients about how they wanted to change and then worked to effect that.

He represented our internal ego-states as Parent, Adult and Child. Since each of us has these states within us we can then analysis our interactions with others in these terms. So that, for instance, a “transaction” between my Child and your Child is very different from that between my Child and your Parent.

These internal states are – for Eric Berne – each a part of our ego. They don’t for instance translate across to Sigmund Freud’s Superego, Ego and I’d.

Transaction Analysis (TA) can be extremely effective; for good or ill. It is used in sales training by some very large companies. For instance an initial Child-Child interaction – “come out to play” – can create an immediate bond, which then is translated into Adult-Adult (typically by asking open questions), from which the needs of a client can be ascertained. However the power of TA can be used to manipulate as well as to break ice or to understand one’s own internal ego-states and from that understanding to effect change.

Berne’s thinking has been taken forward for instance by Thomas Harris in his books “I’m OK, You’re OK” and “Staying OK”, and James Redfield’s “Celestine Prophecy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Berne

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

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“We are spiritual beings having a human experience”

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin was an evolutionary biologist and catholic priest. In the days before the internet he predicted that we would find new ways to share our consciousness and knowledge. Perhaps the AI that we dread is part of this process of shared universal consciousness? In the 1950’s he was already intensely aware of the need to work together for the sake of the earth. As he put it..

“The age of nations has passed. Now, unless we wish to perish, we must shake off our old prejudices and build the Earth. The more scientifically I regard the world, the less can I see any possible biological future for it except in the active consciousness of its unity”

Alternative Zionism

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I believe that the current state of Israel is a tragedy that could have been avoided; and a wasted opportunity.There was (and is?) an alternative. This was set out by Martin Buber, whose book “I and Thou” set up the Philosophy of Relation. He opposed the views of Weizmann and Ben Gurion. Essentially his vision was for the cooperative development of respectful, peaceful, equal and creative society between Jews and Arabs.

In 1925 he co-founded Brith Shalom – The Covenant of Peace – which set out this vision. He fled Austria and Germany during the Nazi holocaust, but persisted with this message. In his 1947 tract “Questions and Answers. The Jewish Settlement of Palestine” he directly addressed the potential for conflict and advocated a path of peace, respect and deep listening. He deplored Jewish terrorism (for instance the attack on the King David Hotel). His vision was for restriction of Jewish immigration, a mutually interdependent society with a common economy for all – Arabs and Jew alike, and the creative growth of a new nation by the efforts and for the benefit of all.

He saw the land between the Jordan and the Mediterranean Sea as a melting pot. Where peoples and cultures could meet and thrive creatively. Where East, West, South and North could come together. A nexus. This view was perhaps natural to his family. They were Hasidic Jews from melting pot of the Polish-Lithuanian Common Wealth. The country that was once the largest in Europe and which stretched from the Baltic to the Black Sea with cultural centres in Poland and Ukraine.

A history of thought and listening and in many languages. Martin Buber spoke and read German, Hebrew, Yiddish, Polish, English, French, Italian, Spanish, Latin, Greek and Dutch.

It is a tragedy for the world that this path was not followed.

Find out more about Martin Buber at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Buber




Surrender to the flow

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”I said to my soul be still, and let the darkness come upon you; which shall be the darkness of God” TS Eliot East Coker

Eliot is discussing the essence of surrender, and what is to be gained from it. As he points out, “we all go into the dark”, because “in order to arrive at what you are not, you must go through the way in which you are not”. Movement implies loss.

But all is change, which accelerates every day. There is no security in clinging on to the familiar.

The physicist and philosopher David Bohm searched for what he calls “the ground”. God, by another name surely. He concludes that this “ground” is a flux, or movement – and that what we perceive as solid – including matter and time – is simply because we are in an eddy – as in a river by the bank the water can appear calm and still.

In that case surrender into what we truly are – is more than acceptance and movement through darkness. It is having the courage to fall into that river. It is flux that is constant. After all even our seemingly fixed bodies are a stream of ever flowing atoms and molecules. We are not separate. We are that flow. It is our seeking for certainty in the material that is our delusion.

Here is a reading of East Coker..

David Bohm. Physicist and Magician

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“We are all linked by a fabric of unseen connections. This fabric is constantly changing and evolving. This field is directly structured and influenced by our behavior and by our understanding.” David Bohm

Read about him at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Bohm

This extraordinary man was a physicist who worked at Princeton with Albert Einstein. Einstein called him his “intellectual son”. He connected physics to philosophy through his extraordinary work on the implicate-explicate universe. He saw that these two ways of being and seeing the universe mirrored the writing of Martin Buber, who started the philosophy of dialogue with his book “I and Thou”. David Bohm was intensely concerned with bringing society back to creative cooperation and away from ever increasing polarisation and conflict.

He proposed a form of dialogue, called Bohmian Dialogue, which took Buber’s ideas and applied them to society. Essentially it is a form of deep listening between people in a group, from which arises newly emergent and creative shared meaning.

He took this to MIT (Massachussetts Institute of Technology), where he was deeply influential on figures such as Peter Senge and Donella Meadows. Peter Senge set up the MIT Dialogue Project, which in turn has been enormously influential in the creation of learning organisations such as Microsoft and Google. Donella Meadows was a founder of systems thinking and the movement toward ecological economics.

He famously worked with Krishnamurti on links between eastern and western thinking and the implication for meaning. Last but by no means least he worked in London with Basil Hiley and Sir Roger Penrose on black holes and consciousness, with links to panpsychism.

Really, an amazing man.

Dialogue connects

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Walking with psychotherapists. Here’s what I found. Dialogue is a way to align feeling and thinking – within us and between us. Try walking with someone in nature. You don’t need to say anything even. You’ll be surprised. I was.. I’d love to know what you think.

Beyond Rivalry

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There is a love which underlies our individual lives. Love which forms the very fabric or the world, which is waiting to hold us – together. Waiting, waiting for us to stop competing one with the other and to realise that we are not alone. Underlying and beyond rivalry is a commonwealth of security and joy. Let us look to that..