Today at work I was obsessing over Carl Jung again. It happens when you're me. You see his shelf in Psychology and the beautifully designed series of his published works. Mysterium Coniunctionis (Mystery of the Conjunction), which is his largest volume, looks absolutely appetizing. Considered by many to be his master work, it reviews the vast literature of Medieval, Renaissance, and post-Renaissance alchemy from a psychological standpoint.
Jung contends, and convincingly demonstrates, that alchemy at this time was not, as many mistakenly believe, mainly concerned with the transmutation of lead into gold. Rather, the aim was more spiritual and mental transformation of the alchemist him/her-self. In this sense, alchemy was a kind of precursor to modern depth psychology.
Particularly because it developed prior to the excessive rationalization of culture which has occurred in recent centuries, the ideas and, in Jung's view, especially the symbology, of alchemy has much to offer to modern psychology.
The "conjunction" referred to in the title refers to an alignment, joining, or resolution of conflict between poles or dualities that define human beings. The poles of one duality of special importance can be variously interpreted as Solar/Lunar, Male/Female, Spirit/Matter, Yang/Yin or various other antinomies.
This type of stuff may bring you to a snore, but for me, it raises the hairs on my neck and pushes my curiosity to the brink. Alchemy, perhaps precisely because its birth was at least 2500 years before Christ, appeals to me because it's not about appeasing the omniscient, omnipresent God above us; much the the contrary, it's about transforming the self into the omniscient, omnipresent God within us.
When you look at history, and all the hardships and obstacles that our ancestors have overcome, and the fact that consciousness (as we know it) is still in its infantile state, a mere 40,000+ years (give or take) out of the 4.5 billion years that Earth has existed, you realize how far we have to go--or rather, how far we could possibly go. Jesus Christ was a major milestone, as was Moses, Mohammed, Buddha, and all the ancients before them. They were milestones in spiritual realization.
Just recently, archeologists found an ancient monument 2800 years old in present-day Turkey which indicates that people believed the body and soul to be separate. During that time, "Semitic contemporaries, including the Israelites, believed that the body and soul were inseparable." It's a great discovery that only heightens the mystery of the afterlife, the after-death, the great void that cannot possibly be imagined. But frankly, it's something that I've always felt since I was a child, even though I had no religious upbringing. I am not an Atheist. Sure, I'm an Atheist in the sense that I do not believe in an omniscient, omnipresent God which mirrors man's image in the literal sense and oversees all that we do and judges us accordingly. In that definition, I think Atheists miss the point. They trash the idea of God without considering the alternatives.
St. Augustine defined God as "that which is greater than which can be conceived," which means that if you can think of the greatest thing possible, then God certainly is greater than that thing because he contains everything that may be conceived of, and therefor God must exist. Now, it's a pretty hardy argument, but that's because it's an ontological argument, one that Augustine wins by his definition of "God."
But Augustine is right in one respect. There are obviously things that are beyond our powers of conception. Atheists refuse to believe that these boundaries will ever hold us back, that through the sheer ambition and force of Science we will discover all the Universe has to hide and therefor will abolish Religion and God as we know it. In my opinion, it is a war they are waging upon the soul.
We all know that side of us. The side that ideas spring from. The side where voices quietly whisper excitement at our daily experience, or our hidden desires and passions, or those secretly vile prejudices that even we can't accept. We know it's the primitive side of us, the unconscious part of our mind, the side which we spend 6-8 hours (depending upon your habits) a day submersed in: sleep and dreams.
It's amazing that we still do not know the purpose of dreams. We can propose possibilities, but ultimately we don't know. Carl Jung did extraordinary work in the realm of studying dreams and interpreting their meanings, and even though he identified many archetypal dreams and symbols, even he realized that there was no way to pin down the exact meaning of dreams; all he could say was that the unconscious mind and its products were compensatory to the conscious mind and its products.
The unconscious mind is the realm of dragons. It's the realm of Easter Bunnies, Santa Clauses, Hobbits, Freddie Krugers, mermaids, cyclopi, Nessies, and countless other occultus. It's the realm of God, Adam and Eve. The realm of the Big Bang, Gravity, Mathematics, and Black Holes. It's the world beneath the soil of the earth, beneath the grey matter of our mind--the world between the electrical synapses of our neurons that sparks for a fraction of a millisecond and reveals itself to us in the form of a feeling, a vision, a sound, or maybe some unfamiliar smell that draws us in a new direction. To me, that is God, and it's that God which I respect and seek to draw knowledge and insight from.
If there's any God that I pray to, it's the unknown, arcane substance within me, the part that gave me life and continues to do so. It certainly isn't physical or tangible to our senses. It's beyond them, or below them, or perhaps both--most likely both. Because for all we know, the unconscious could easily be an infinite chain-linked continuum that reaches the furthest depths of the universe only to double back into the microcosmic depths of our biological foundation.
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