Friday, June 26, 2020

Jung thought

I was recently exposed to G.W. Leibniz's volume "Discourse on Metaphysics and other essays" and I decided that I am an Averroesist and/or a Quietist based on this material, which I was prepared for by re-reading Dostoyevsky's "The Idiot" as well as G.K. Chesterton's book on St. Thomas Aquinas. One of the great influences in my life, the Peruvian-born Fernando Pacheco claimed, during the time when I was living in Winston-Salem, NC, that monads are actually people, whereas Leibniz says they are really windows made of the simplest substances from which one can look out on the world. Could there be a relationship between monads and the psychology of C.G. Jung? While I think highly of Jung's conception of an unconscious ruled by male and female principles, which he names the anima and the animus, my first exposure to Jung's theory when I was a Freshman at Rockland Community College M/TS program, left me somewhat confused. Only now am I able to truly appreciate his genius. (I honestly feel that it is only since I moved to Massachusetts that I have learned to be a good reader.) According to Jung, the psyche or unconscious mind bears a similarity to God in that the process of individuation emanates from a collective unconscious structured by archetypes, which he claims were most fully constellated in the presence of the historical Christ-Jesus. Most scholars take Jung's naming of Christ to be nothing more than a symbolization of the self, but I believe that Christ's suffering and death connote a more pressing and pertinent reality, one which forces us to make a distinction between symbolic truth and literal truth, and this is where Averroism comes in: Jung speaks about the role of the archetypes in the process of individuation, but he doesn't speaks about the process of de-individuation. It is as if it has been revealed to me in a dream, that when we die we experience a reversal of exterior and interior, literary meaning becomes literal meaning, and all cognition and descriptive language become nothing more than an ineffable dream, a prelude to the joy one experiences at being re-united with the collective mind. Someday we will all find out if Jung, Leibniz and Averroes are correct !

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