The Spiritual Problem of Modern Man

Because of having to participate in the various talks and discussions of the UUHK, I have to read up again on religion. For this purpose, I turned my attention to C. G. Jung, one of the first psychologists, apart from William James, to have focused on how our psyche may have affected religion and vice versa. In a chapter called "The Spiritual Problem of Modern Man" in his book "Modern Man in Search of a Soul" first published in 1933 and republished in 1984, Jung has something to say which to me may still be relevant to the predicament of contemporary man, in search of spirituality. 

 

To Jung, the modern man is "a newly formed human being". But we are not modern merely by virtue of living in contemporary society. To him, the modern man must be "fully conscious of one's existence as a man" and requires "the most intensive and extensive consciousness, with a minimum of unconsciousness." . He must be fully conscious of "the present". Every advance towards consciousness removes him further and further away from what he calls the "participation mystique" with the mass of men: his submersion in their "common unconsciousness". To Jung, psychologically, the lowest stratum of contemporary society live "almost as unconsciously as primitive races". And only those at the highest stratum are conscious of the changes which have occurred in the "last few centuries". The values and strivings of those past worlds no longer interest him except as history and to that extent, he has become "estranged" from the mass of his fellow men who still live entirely within the bounds of tradition. He alone has outgrown and discarded the old tradition and become in a sense, "unhistorical": he stands almost alone, before a void, an abyss, from which a new spirituality may grow.The truly modern man, in contrast to the pseudo-moderns, must take "the vows of poverty and chastity in a new sense" and renounce "the halo which history bestows as a mark of its sanction.". To be "unhistorical" is to the masses, "the Promethean sin" and thus a "higher level of consciousness is like a burden of guilt.". This is by no means easy because "unless he can atone by creative ability for his break with tradition, he is merely disloyal to the past.". Denial of the past must never be equated with consciousness of the present! Paradoxically, the truly modern man is "old-fashioned": he "emphasizes the past in order to hold the scales against his break with tradition and against that guilt"!

 

The truly modern man does not live in the "illusion" that he is at the culmination of the history of man, the fulfilment and the end product of countless centuries. He realizes too, that he is also "the disappointment of the hopes and expectations of the ages: he has seen how beneficent are science, technology and organization but also how catastrophic they can be."  He has seen how well-meaning government who try to defend peace by preparing for war in peace time and how the Christian ideal of the brotherhood of man, the liberal ideal of international social democracy and the socialist solidarity of the working class have all failed the baptism of fire: the test of reality. Therefore the modern man is profoundly "skpetical" and "uncertain".

 

The rise into prominence of psychology in the modern world is to Jung, itself a symptom of the malaise of the modern soul. To him, the human psyche has not always and everywhere been found "inside" the human soul: "It is to be found at the outside in whole races or periods of history which take no account of psychic life as such."e.g in ancient Egypt with its imposing objectivity and its "naive confession of sins that have not been committed"! The Egyptian dead will confess to the judges of the underworld crimes he has not committed and leave unmentioned his "actual" sins! To Jung, "we can no more feel the Pyramids and the Apis tombs of Sakhara to be expressions of personal problems or personal emotions than we can feel this of the music of Bach." To him whenever man's yearnings and hopes are adequately expressed in ritual or spiritual forms, then to that extent we may say that the human psyche is outside and if so, then strictly speaking, there is no spiritual problem. There was no need to go deeper. Formerly, the priests were only concerned with the undisturbed functioning of the psyche within a recognized system of beliefs and so long as this served tolerably well, the psyche is not regarded as a "problem" in itself. "While men still lives as a herd being he has no 'things of the spirit' of his own; nor does he need any save the usual belief in the immortality of the soul.". 

 

When religion can no longer embrace life in all its fullness, the "psyche" then becomes a problem which must be dealt with on the basis of experience and no longer on the basis of articles of faith or the postulates of any philosophical system. The same applies in the case of the psyche. As long as we function normally, instead of being "split" up into different "selves" which thwart each other, there is no need to study "psychology": urges of sex, violence and socially acceptable "morality". The psyche has always existed. But previously, no one took it as seriously as we do! In former times,  psychic life has always found expression in some sort of metaphysical system. The truly  modern man realizes that the dark forces of the unconscious psyche can no longer be fitted in with our rational world order.  We have now lost faith in ourselves and in our own worth! Through his skepticism, the modern man is now thrown back upon himself. We realize that we can no longer live like the Medieval man, who knew exactly his place in an orderly cosmo and where every one was under the solicitous care of a loving Father in heaven, who prepared him for eternal bliss and all knew exactly what they should do and how they should conduct themselves to rise from a corruptible world to an incorruptible and joyous afterworld! This kind of life is no longer real to us! 

 

Now we must rely upon our own resources of material security, general welfare and our humanity. Now we find as much chaos in the inner world of our psyche as in the chaotic world outside in which we live our everyday lives, where order and chaos take turn to dominate under the ancient law of blind chance first discovered by Heraclitus and which he termed "enantiodromia" (conversion into the opposite). Now there are no longer any lasting social or political order: just like in the material sphere:  everything is subject to constant changes even in theory e. g.  the Heisenberg's principle of quantum uncertainty. What is most disconcerting is the discovery that even though psychology has given us the insight that we have so much evil in this world because man in general is so hopelessly unconscious, we are still far from having discovered a foolproof way of dealing with it! "Now the various forms of religon no longer appear to the modern man to come from within--to be expressions of his own psychic life; for him, they are to be classed with the things of the outer world. He is vouchsafed no revelations of a spirit that is not of this world".

 

But to Jung,  "for evey piece of conscious life that loses its importance and value, there arises a compensation in the unconscious." This to him is a psychological law. Therefore we find that the contemporary man tries on a number of religions and convictions as if they were Sunday attire only to be laid aside after a while like used clothes! Hence we see now the rise of all kinds of interest in psycho-analysis, enneagrams, feng shui, spiritualism, gnosticism, black magic, white magic, voodoo, cargo cult, astrology, theosophy, anthroposophy, Christian Science, kundalini yoga, fortune telling etc. They all call themselves "science" because traditional religion has grown suspect., almost as suspect as politics and world reform. "The modern man abhors dogmatic postulates taken on faith and the religions based upon them. He holds them valid only in so far as their knowledge-content seems to accord with his own experience of the deeps of psychic life. He wants to know--to experience for himself. " They all ask the same question. Every theosophist asks: what shall I experience at higher levels of consciousness? Every astrologer asks: what are the effective forces and determinants of my fate beyond the reach of my conscious intention? Every psychoanalyst asks: what are the unconscious drives behind the neurosis?  To Jung, the world has never seen anything like this since the end of the 17th century. He sees the flowering of all kinds of spiritualism as another analogous example of the application of the law of conservation of energy in physics, except that now its application is transposed from the conscious to the unconscious. To him, no psychic value can disappear without being replaced by another of equivalent intensity. He finds this law being validated everyday in his practice as a psycho-therapist. But even more, what is true of the individual is also true of a people! He says, "just as in me, a single human being, the darkness calls forth the helpful light, so does it also in the psychic life of a people.". 

 

The contemporary man find the dirt from the psyche interesting and fascinating. He says: "the gods whom we are called to dethrone are the idolized values of our conscious world. It is well known that it was the love-scandals of the ancient deities which contributed most to their discredit; and now history is repeating itself. People are laying bare the dubious foundations of our belauded virtues and incomparable ideals, and are calling  out to us in triumph: 'There are your man-made gods, mere snares and delusions tainted with human baseness--white sepulcres full of dead men's bones and of all uncleanness.'" But to Jung, all the new spiritualism that he finds are merely a rehash of the ideas of the East. He says, "After all, what does Theosophy, with its doctrine of karma and reincarnation, seek to teach except that this world of appearance is but a temporary health-resort for the morally unperfected? It depreciates the present day world no less radically than does the modern outlook, but with the help of a different technique; it does not vilify our world, but grants it only a relative meaning in that it promises other and higher worlds. The result is in either case the same." The modern man falls back upon the reality of psychic life and expects from it that certainty which the world denies him. To Jung, the Occidental burns incense to himself, and his own countenance is veiled from him in the smoke. To a Red Indian to whom Jung spoke, the West tried to lord it in every land, even those that concern him not at all. He thinks that Christianity is the only truth and the white Christ the only Redeemer. But the stamping out of polygamy in Uganda has given rise to prostitution and a rapid rise of venereal disease!

 

To Jung, superstition and perversity are all one and the same: they are transitional or embryonic stages from which new and riper forms will emerge. To him, the West has built a monumental world about itself which looks so imposing only because it has spent upon its outside all that is imposing in the nature of the Western man but once he looks inside, he finds something shabby and insufficient. He finds relativism in the West destructive because it is taken as the final principle but he also sees hope. Jung says: "I wish to emphasize that the fact that the unconscious has a strong attraction not only for the sick, but for the healthy, constructive minds as well--and this in spite of its alarming aspect. The psychic deaths are nature, and nature is creative life. It is true that nature tears down what she has herself built up--yet she builds it once again. Whatever values in the visible world are destroyed by modern relativism, the psyche will produce their equivalents...Light is always born of darkness and the sun never yet stood still in heaven to satisfy man's longing or to still his fears.".

 

Jung sees a reversal of the role of the East and West: "while we are turning upside down the material world of the East with our technical proficiency, the East with its psychic proficiency is throwing our spiritual world into confusion...while we are overpowering the Orient from without, it may be fastening its hold upon us from within. " He cites the example of the Roman Empire after its conquest of Asia Minor: out of Cilica, came the Mithraic cult, the religion of the Roman army and it spread from Egypt to Britain. And even Christianity came from the East! Astrology which the West has just taken up is daily bread in the East. The idea of indeterminacy and philosophic relativism is the basis of Chinese science. And even complicated psychological processes have already been described in certain Chinese texts shown to him by Richard Wilhem. Psychology is just child's play to Buddhist thoughts on the functioning of the human mind and emotions. Oskar A H Schmitz has already traced parallels between psycho-analysis and yoga. To Jung, it is from the depths of the psyche that new spiritual forms will arise, when the West learns that the claims of the spirit is given as much emphasis as its material and social life. There is certainly a yearning for rest in the restless West and a longing for security bred in a period of insecurity. Yet to him, the new interest the West finds in the human psyche is not necessarily pathological. He says, "When the attractive power of psychic life is so strong that man is neither repelled nor dismayed by what he is sure to find, then it has nothing of sickness or perversion about it.". But to him, what is significant is always below the horizon of consciousness. That flower may bloom only in the night. He reminds us: "In daylight everything is clear and tangible; but the night lasts as long as the day and we live in the night-time also. ..And the day's life is for many people such a bad dream that they long for the night when the spirit wakes.".

 

To Jung, another trend may also be relevant spiritually: the emphasis on sports and the valuation of the human body. He says: "We can hardly be surprised if this lead to the rediscovery of the body after its long depreciation in the name of the spirit. We are even tempted to speak of the body's revenge upon the spirit...The body lays claim to equal recognition...If we can reconcile ourselves with the mysterious truth that spirit is the living body seen from within, and the body the outer manifestation of the living spirit--the two being really one--then we can understand why it is that the attempt to transcend the present level of consciousness must give its due to the body. We shall also see that belief in the body cannot tolerate an outlook that denies the body in the name of the spirit...an enormous tension arises between the opposite poles of outer and inner life, between objective and subjective reality....perhaps it is a desperate or a wholesome effort of conscious man to cheat the laws of nature of their hidden might and to wrest a yet greater, more heroic victory from the sleep of the nations. This is a question which history will answer.".

 

But Jung advises caution. "I do not forget that my voice is but one voice, my experience a mere drop in the sea, my knowledge no greater than the visual field in a microsope, my mind's eye a mirror that reflects a small corner of the world and my ideas--a subjective confession". But if it is a voice, what a mighty and prophetic voice and if a mirror, what a powerful mirror! Almost everything he said back in the 1933 has come to pass, in many respects even in Westernized Hong Kong!