I haven’t kept up with psychology since the death of Jung

I haven’t kept up with psychology since the death of Jung

I haven’t kept up with psychology since the death of Jung

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I haven’t kept up with psychology since the death of Jung, but I’d say that Jung was such a person: one grounded in eternity and moving in the field of time. Jean and I had tea for an hour-and-a-half with Dr. and Mrs. Jung at Bollingen, his place at Lake Zurich. It was a lovely occasion. Since he was editing some of the German posthuma of Zimmer and I had done my work on the English, we had no trouble saying hello and enjoying things together without any anxiety of understanding. When we were about to leave Jung said, “So, you’re going to India. Well, let me tell you the meaning of OM.

“When I was in Africa a group of us went for a little hike. Presently, we knew we were lost. Then we looked around and saw all these boys with things in their noses, standing on one leg, supporting themselves with spears. Nobody knew how to talk to anybody else. We had no knowledge of their language. It was a tense moment. We all just sat down and kept looking at each other. When everybody felt that everything was okay—”it’s okay, these are good people, they’re perfectly okay”—what do I hear? ‘OM...OM...OM...’

“Then, the next year I was in India with a group of scientists, and if there’s one variety of the human species that is not susceptible to awe, this is it. We went up to Darjeeling, to Tiger Hill, which is a wonderful experience. You are awakened early in the morning about a half hour before sunrise and driven in the chilly morning air to a lofty ridge. And it’s dark. When the sun rises, you see before you millions of square miles of Himalayan peaks breaking into rainbow colors. What did I hear from the scientists? ’OM...OM...OM...’ OM is the sound nature makes when it’s pleased with itself.”

That’s an example of the kind of playful conversation that we had. He was a beautiful man, and Jean said that he had beautiful eyes.

Jung found out in 1909 that myth and dream were linked, but it has been well known in India forever. It is implicit in the syllable OM, or A-U-M.

According to the Māṇḍūkya Upaniṣad, the world of the state of waking consciousness is to be identified with the letter A of the syllable AUM; that of dream consciousness (heaven and hell, that is to say) with the letter U; and deep sleep (the state of the mystical union of the knower and the known, God and his world, brooding the seeds and energies of creation: which is the state symbolized in the center of the mandala) with M. The soul is to be propelled both by and from this syllable AUM into the silence beyond and all around it: the silence out of which it rises and back into which it goes when pronounced—slowly and rhythmically ...as AUM—AUM—AUM. 

If you want to hear AUM, just cover your ears and you’ll hear it. Of course, what you are hearing is the blood in the capillaries, but it’s AUM: Ah—waking consciousness; ou—dream consciousness; and then, mmm—the realm of deep, dreamless sleep. AUM is the sound of the radiance of God. This is the most mysterious and important thing to understand, but once you get the idea, it’s very simple.

“The dream is a little hidden door in the innermost secret recesses of the soul, opening into that cosmic night which was psyche long before there was any ego-consciousness, and which will remain psyche no matter how far our ego-consciousness may extend. For all ego- consciousness is isolated: because it separates and discriminates, it knows only particulars, and it sees only what can be related to the ego. Its essence is limitation, even though it reach to the farthest nebulae among the stars. All consciousness separates; but in dreams we put on the likeness of that more universal, truer, more eternal man dwelling in the darkness of primordial night. There he is still the whole, and the whole is in him, indistinguishable from nature and bare of all egohood. “It is from these all-uniting depths that the dream arises, be it never so childish, grotesque, or immoral. So flowerlike is it in its candor and veracity that it makes us blush for the deceitfulness of our lives.”— Jung

The secret of dreams is that subject and object are the same. The object is self-luminous, fluent in form, multivalent in its meanings. It’s your dream, the manifestation of your will, and yet you are surprised by it. This is the relationship of ego-consciousness to the unconscious. Ego-consciousness has to learn about the unconscious, and dreams are the vocabulary of the unconscious speaking to the conscious mind. Yet, in dreams and in visions, subject and object are the same.

Dream, vision, God—God is a luminous vision. The image of God is equivalent to the dream vision. So your God is an aspect of yourself, just as your dream image is. That’s what is meant by the Hindu saying, nādevo devam arcayet, “by none but a god shall a god be worshiped.” Your god is a manifestation of your own level of consciousness. All of the heavens and all of the hells are within you. This understanding is just taken for granted in India, so we are in the realm of myth.

Write down your dreams. They are your myths.

Now, this consciousness is unconscious, but the body is conscious; there is consciousness still there. The heart is beating, the blood is running through the body. If you are cold you will pull the blanket up over you; if you are hot you will push the blanket down. I recall a cartoon in a magazine of a husband and wife in bed. He has all the covers over him, and he’s dreaming about watching a hula dancer on a South Sea isle. She’s freezing and thinks of herself in an Eskimo igloo. The body is conscious.

The point is that consciousness itself is below this level of darkness, beyond dream consciousness. In one of the Upaniṣads there is a saying: “We go into that brahman world every night, but, alas, we are asleep.” The goal of yoga is to go into that realm awake. If you do, you will have arrived at pure, unmitigated, undifferentiated consciousness. Not consciousness of any thing, because you are not on levels A or U, but consciousness per se. Since all of our words relate either to things or to a relationship of things—whether things of waking or visions of dream—there are no words for this experience. All that can be said about it is silence.

Silence is the proper vocabulary of this realization. The Buddha is called Shakyamuni. The word muni means “the silent one,” and Shakya is his family name, so he is the silent one of the Shakya clan. This is why Zimmer said that the best things can’t be told—there are no words for this realization. And when you utter words in order to refer the mind to it, the danger is that the words will trap you and you won’t go through. So, for anyone lecturing, there’s a not very comfortable saying: “He who speaks, does not know. He who knows, does not speak.” That’s the final word.

The point is that this AUM heard in silence informs all things. All things are manifestations of it. Now you are inward turned. The secret to having a spiritual life as you move in the world is to hear the AUM in all things all the time. If you do, everything is transformed. You no longer have to go anywhere to find your fulfillment and achievement and the treasure that you seek. It is here. It is everywhere.

Clearly the occurrence of such visions over the whole in-habited earth requires no explanation in terms either of racial or of cultural diffusion. The problem is, rather, psychological: of that depth of the unconscious where, to quote the words of C. G. Jung, “man is no longer a distinct individual, but his mind widens out and merges into the mind of mankind—not the conscious mind, but the unconscious mind of mankind, where we are all the same.”

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Reflections on the Art of Living,

Joseph Campbell

Edited by Diane K. Osbon