To begin -- I again thank Jelel for encouraging me to read Carl Jung's Red Book, which Jung described as his final understanding of the human mind, brain and soul. Because of the great role of Freud and Jung in our cultural history, a lot has been written about Jung (and more is being written), but a lot of it misses the forest for the trees. I did not even try to read ALL of the large scholarly book yesterday, but I am now beginning to assimilate the crucial parts which he wrote himself in very powerful words, which I scanned somewhat to the end. As I was reading by our back patio doors, overlooking a huge forest park, there was a kind of ... explosion?... and billowing smoke down across the creek, and sirens and helicopters; as a result, I moved back up here to the kitchen, where a video interview with Jung appeared on the small TV hanging on the kitchen wall. That video is also input to what I learned about and from Jung.
One amusing detail providing background... Jung commented on the differences between his type of thinking and Freud's.
Jung's view of this difference remind me of what I learned from Bernie Baars in 1999, as we ate at a local sushi bar near UNU where we were attending the world's first international conference on Consciousness. Modern personality psychology discusses many variables to try to describe human personalities; among the most important and heritable are "tolerance of cognitive dissonance" and "novelty seeking." After World War II, some VERY serious historians (like Lippmann??) explained the Nazis in part as a demonstration of low tolerance of cognitive dissonance -- an insistence on order and coherence even at the expense of willfully blinding oneself to data and experience which contradicts the beliefs which give order to one's life. Ordnung uber alles. (Vishnu over Shiva?) Novelty seeking works against the frozen thinking which ordung can give rise to, as we are driven to experience and see and accept what did NOT fit our old limited conceptions. In general, Bernie told me, most people tend to be low tolerance of cognitive dissonance AND low novelty seeking, OR high on both traits. Deep progress in science tends to depend on less common and less satisfied people where the traits do not align; for example, I was born with a low tolerance of cognitive dissonance and a high novelty seeking, which constantly puts stress on my beliefs, the kind of stress which often creates new beliefs or theories.
On the whole, Freud was more the ordnung kind of thinker, and Jung the novelty seeker, though Jung would use different categories. Jung's concept of "introverted' and "extroverted" spawned a whole industry of business consultants developing things like Briggs-Meyer tests' I still remember when Joe Young, who ran cognitive science research at NSF, fulminated about the terrible confusion caused by the folks selling those tests who did now know what more modern research really shows.
But in any case, ung's novelty seeking caused him to explore and write about so MANY areas, so many types of people and ideas, that he gives a unique challenge to anyone who tries to summarize it all. I will not try to summarize it ALL here!! But there is enough, in clearly seeing some basics.
Having been born in 1875 and lived to 1961, and treated patients in Europe for most of that time, Jung was DEEPLY engaged in what caused the World Wars, and what will flow from them. He was deeply impacted by detailed dreams predicting his experience at the start of World War I, when he had issues getting back home from talks he was giving in Scotland. I did not yet read the specific meditation exercises he developed, but he was deeply engaged in what some would call exploration of the astral plane from that time to the end of his life. He occasionally wrote about theoretical explanations like ancestral memory, but mainly these writings focus on "the facts, not the editorials."
HIS feeling about World Wars I and II was that they were mainly caused by a crisis of meaning and spiritual disconnection, similar in a way to what a group centered on the University of Toronto (I cc Dave Clement to thank him for informing me of that group) concerned about a new crisis of meaning growing stronger even today. (I really hope that the US does not go the way of Nazi Germany!! Trump is not Caesar or Hitler, but many make such associations.)
Jung felt that the great triumph of modern rationalism and impersonal social organization caused a great disconnection from spirit and inner connections which hold life together, causing... World wars. (He did not mention links to depression, rural to city migration, flu, Spengler and Weber, all of which I would comment on if this were another red Book. In general, they do fit the picture.) It is interesting to compare the reaction in China to Jiang Zemin to the reaction in Germany to modern impersonal rationalism in the early twentieth century; Trump and Xi have some deep things in common.
He himself did NOT feel such disconnection PERSONALLY, but could feel how strong it was all around him in the individuals and populations he felt deeply connected to.
In the later parts of the book, as he saw deeper and deeper, it did NOT feel like a kind of seance, as one of his better critics has described. Rather... well, you have a right to accuse me of bias, but it felt more and more familiar, like the view of astral plane and connection experience which I tried to explain (on a more scientific foundation, as in Freud's way of thinking but even more ordnung) via werbos.com/religions.htm. "Travels in the noosphere." Verdansky's theory of noosphere (like de Chardin) viewed noosphere as earth or Gaia, but as I look at the flows of dark matter out there and other effects, I view our noosphere as "stretching from the archaea deep in the mud below us to the convolutions of the sun above." More like Ameraterasu than Gaia, but better even "Terry", a young child.
Jung's ultimate experience was more like that than like Verdansky. He spoke of maturing past the naive neurotic view of oneself as a kind of god, but more as a kind of ... servant... of... he described communication with a kind of avatar of..
what I might call Terry. (But no, I don't use such words much in my own engagements there. Jung also said he often used images rather than words when working on that level.)
So meaning and purpose in real human life comes from those CONNECTIONS.
Jung felt very disappointed in the end that he could not continue let alone expand that connection within the noosphere all the way to "Terry", to the highest reflection of that core ego mind level of noosphere. He was ushered out with respect and support, not at all to termination or diminution, but simply back to the ordinary levels of connection which keep almost all of the best of us alive, more like connections with other people, groups of people and archetypes, many of them reflections of reflections of reflections. (These reflect the levels and levels of "matching" that Pribram talks about in Brain and Perception.)
So how does that connect to the writings of Karl Schroder, a living futurist, government advisor and science fiction writer whom Heiner and Amanda and I have had the honor of discussing the future with? (The AGI part.) Even as people like
Trump and Xi Jinping remind us of the great cycles of history such as Spengler wrote about, and as Jung casts light on those cycles, we are entering now a radical transformation due to the emergence of... another form of life on this planet.
if you don't believe me, if you suffer from intolerance of cognitive dissonance.
Schroeder has asked, in effect: "Which should we CHOOSE, the future as depicted in my new novel Stealing Worlds [which I highly recommend] or my novel(s?) VENTUS, which depict the later stage of history we may be moving towards, where all technologies and resources are more fully utilized?" (Comment: I remember novels by Zindell and Vinge touching on similar issues. In fact, Karl himself mentioned Vinge in our discussions.) How human do we want our solar system to be? How can we retain our sense of meaning and purpose, as humans, in the face of choices like THAT?"
One of my own first reactions is: "It is beyond my pay grade.' Indeed, it is above anyone's pay grade when the ultimate context goes even beyond this solar system. (The noosphere itself is after all like a child not yet clear on its role and identity in a cosmos which is much much larger, with technologies not available here.) And when the fighting blind factions on earth keep reminding me of ANOTHER contemporary of Jung, the poet Yeats, who talked of a time when "the best lack all conviction, the worst are full of passionate intensity", feelings which Jung deeply engaged with and mostly coped with. Jung's coping mechanisms may be just as important to HIS source of meaning and purpose, which basically get grounded most effectively in the noosphere. (Though what is his "spirit of the deeps?" Compatible, I suppose. Maybe compatible with Yeshua's particular "Father" channel?)
That source of meaning and purpose, and the psychic energy which can keep us alive, also reminds me of the final part of the FT article on a Dalai Lama viewpoint:
In a way, our connection to support the life of the earth is ONE way ro be the kind of "good doggie, like Hachiko" which Jung tried to be but failed at in the ultimate experience he relates. Jung did OK anyway, but it is possible and natural to try to do better. And yes, I remember the quote attributed to pope Francis that "Those who would preserve the life of this world must learn first to deeply feel the love for that life. [At the full PSI level, in my view. Perhaps he would say "spiritual."
Same meaning here.]
But what kind of internet design would allow us to escape the DEEP danger to the whole earth from present designs, like what Jung described as causing World War, by actively strengthening the deep human and nature dimensions? What kind of new human networks could collaborate and connect enough to rise to this challenge? I still wish I knew.
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