Jung: Psyche is soul (It is also infinite)

Dreams
(Image by Mike Bonitz)   Details   DMCA

................................

Psyche in Greek is "soul". Psyche is not tied to the material world and yet it is tethered to our mortality. When we pass into an after-life state, nobody knows what happens to our self-awareness or our self. Without a self (small s), the psyche is impersonal. When we aren't making memories (of dreams or waking experiences) the psyche still holds us, but it is impersonal.

The psyche is the potential for self-awareness that is our birthright. It begins to expand at birth like a blossoming bud except that it is not a thing, but a dimension. It contains our self-awareness within a larger, potentially infinite awareness because the psyche has no limits. In dreams, the psyche (or the unconscious) might be represented by the ocean because it is both vast and bottomless.

Jung wanted everyone to grasp how the psyche is not individual but collective by nature. When we dream we are in a psychic dimension but there is no firewall between, say, a given dreamer's experience of an archetype (such as the archetype of climbing a mountain) and someone else's experience of that archetype.

When I was teaching at Green Mountain College and was doing dreamwork with a half dozen students, it was fairly common for several of them to be dreaming around the same archetypal themes even though nobody was sharing their dreams within the group and I was maintaining confidentiality. At times they would even be in each other's dreams on the same night.

When we are dreaming we are in a purely psychic dimension. We don't know the "laws" that define the psyche (the way we have codified the laws that govern the physical universe) and the reason for that is, there is no consistent reference point by which to measure or quantify psychic reality, except for the self (small s), which is subjective. (Jung went far beyond what the science of the day was willing to consider, because, for Jung, the Self (large S) was a consistent reference point within the psychic dimension of dreaming, and he goes into this in his introduction and foreword to Richard Wilhelm's translation of the I-Ching which I recommend reading. Jung's professional relationship (bordering on friendship) with Wolfgang Pauli is very telling of how Jung was committed to demonstrating how his acausal principle of synchronicity helps explain why the subjective element needs to be factored into the results of experiments with subatomic particles. It continues to amaze me how the scientific community shamelessly tiptoes around synchronicity even though it has been embraced by mainstream culture as a synonym for meaningful coincidence, even though almost no one knows how it works in principle. The point is, science is completely missing the boat here, not to mention modern psychology!)

The people who know the most about the psychic dimension are those who are not stuck in a certain mental framework or worldview but are open to new experiences. This would include Jung and John Muir (both great empiricists) or serious psychonauts (who have journeyed or tripped so many times with psychotropic plants or LSD etc. that they have lost count), or masters of meditation within ancient traditions that cultivate meditation. . . . Except Buddhists would not refer to the psyche but they might differentiate between mind / heart, intellect, and consciousness. In Buddhist practice, psyche would be understood as a dynamic, impermanent process, not permanent or everlasting, so this is where their sense of the psyche or psychic reality would veer away from Jung's dream-based understanding of the psyche as soul.)

For Jung, the psyche is integral to human experience. It is the dimension of awareness which we navigate as conscious beings, whether we are asleep or preparing for a board meeting.

Another thing to think about, which I find fascinating, is that, because the psyche is a dimension, it can be accessed by energetic beings (or spirits) who occupy other dimensions. That is how it happened that, when I returned to Vermont from the rainforest, where I worked with ayahuasca, there were spirits in my psyche. My self-consciousness was very thin, so the veil between realities was thin. The situation was, I was dreaming awake some of the time (in the weeks after my return from Peru) and was aware of the presence of spirits that, in a manner of speaking, hitched with me, in my psyche, from the rainforest! (The shaman warned us that this could happen.) This sounds bizarre, but I am not making this up. After a while, as my self-consciousness re-established itself, the veil became more of a firewall. (In other words, I reestablished my Western psychic boundaries, favoring the integrity of the self.) Perhaps you can appreciate that, in the rainforest, spirits (both helpful and unhelpful) are available to either assist or hinder a shaman's work. That is why the healing rituals are so important, because spirits respect ritual.

I see where what I wrote might be confusing. If the psyche is collective by nature, but Jung equated it with soul, isn't soul personal? As in, my soul versus your soul? Yes, the psyche is impersonal or collective by nature. Think of all the people out there dreaming and living at various levels of awareness. The existence of the psyche is like an ocean that holds everyone, and its existence (the existence of the collective psyche) does not depend on any of those individual awarenesses. When you dream, you are in that vast psychic dimension but, first and foremost, you are in your dream, which is highly (exquisitely) personal. You can see this as a paradox, but it is just a paraphrase of the self / Self relationship or (in Hinduism) the atman / Atman (individual and World soul). The fish is not aware that it is floating in a world that is 1000 miles of water in every direction. It just goes about its life. But we are. Life gave us self-awareness, or consciousness. It is that consciousness that allows us to "swim" in the boundless unconscious that our dreams barely scratch the surface of. Psychotropics give us a taste of how vast the sea of consciousness really is. It is the sap of a living planet. It is the ultimate gift -- to be aware of our mortality. That seems like soul to me.