Jung, Legibility, and Pepe Silvie

If you throw a schizophrenia, try to pick up the pieces afterwards

Been thinking about Jung a lot lately.

In his mid-30s, he “threw a schizophrenia” (his words), and was overcome with visions, with a flood of inner images — to which he later attributed the entirety of the work he is most known for. He said that his time with the inner images was the crucial bit, everything else came from that.

So when we talk and think using concepts like Archetypes, the Collective Unconscious, Active Imagination, the Transcendent Function, enantiodromia… what we’re doing is benefitting from the fruits of Jung’s shamanic initiation. We are taking advantage of the gifts he brought back from his journeys in the other world.

What stands out to me, having read The Red Book (his account of the inner journeys that led to his formation of depth psychology), and his published works is that you might not guess the presence of one from the other. Looking at his published books and intellectual frameworks, you might not guess they were the result of unsettling shamanic visions — and looking at his sequence of shamanic visions, you wouldn’t guess that their biggest effect on the world would come in the form of academic texts and analytic psychology.

The visions are full of conversations with the Soul, full of the spirit of the times and the spirit of the depths, full of Salome and Elijah and the spirit guide Philemon. There are floods and murders and deserts bursting into bloom.

It’s not that the academic work doesn’t contain mythic imagery, but in that context it’s treated much more at a distance. There are very few points where you’d guess that it was written by a man who had journeyed into the land of myth himself.

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I’ve been thinking about this largely because I’ve been throwing a schizophrenia of my own. I haven’t talked much about my practice and inner world over the past year, but I’ve talked about the years of somatic meditation and imaginal journeying that led up to the past year (and that probably account for how I’ve been able to navigate my own Red Book situation as it unfolds).

As my own inner weirdness accelerates and blooms, I draw some lessons and some comfort from Jung’s example. Just because weird technicolor schizo-mythic stuff is going on, and just because it seems to be going somewhere and wants to be shared… that doesn’t mean it wants to be shared literally or uncritically. Jung didn’t have to build a system around his spirit guide Philemon, and I don’t necessarily have to write a book about a cosmic bison and the wave patterns in the body of Shiva. It’s fine to simply let the unfolding continue and follow where it goes — and it’s fine if where it ends up bears little resemblance to where it came from.

I may end up with something perfectly intelligible and respectable to share with people, when all is said and done — despite the process itself looking like a red-yarn conspiracy wall about consciousness & the gods & li patterns & attention & embodied myth & the humanities & yin-yang dynamics & worship as attention-craft & & & &

That’s a comforting thought, that this might all end up in a place of simplicity and practicality. Despite all the Pepe Silvie-ing.

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There is a lead lining though, to be fair. I wouldn’t sell Jung’s approach as an unmitigated success. He made trade-offs. He knew this. For one, there’s this little tidbit:

Jung wasn’t a fan of the Jungians, it seems. He also said towards the end of the life that he had failed in his mission. His life had been a mission to remind humans that they have souls, and he felt that he had failed in this.

By couching his insights and boons in the frame and language of academic psychology, he successfully gave us all respectable ways to talk about the sacred, mythic currents that underly life and psyche and culture. But he also put these insights in a position to be drained of life, to be turned into bloodless vocabulary that drips from listless podiums at conferences and lecture halls. He took the living, pulsing blood of his journey into cosmic consciousness, and he brought smuggled it in to the home of the intellect, so the intellect could learn to respect it — but he also allowed it to be taken over and manhandled by the exact institutions where intellect is most disconnected from soul, from heart, from body, from humanity.

So there’s a lot to learn from and admire in Jung’s way of processing and spreading the insights of his shamanic initiation. But not all of the lessons I take are positive ones.